


Touch Me Not.

by Aproclivity



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: F/M, It's Free Real Estate, Missing Scenes, Richard Strand is Darcy in a horror movie, Soulmate AU, Strand is such a little bitch i love him but it's true, Strand's gotta Strand, alex reagan can be a complete asshole when she needs to be and she is in this, alex reagan/a good night sleep/a sense of self preservation is the ot3 that will never be, canon levels of bad decision making, extremely reluctant psychic richard strand, oh look an actual explanation for nic's personality transplant between episodes, oh look i'm plugging some of the holes in canon, soulmate: sex at first touch, the fact that richard strand doesn't get punched on a daily basis is a miracle he doesn't believe in, these two fucking idiots, unless you're as willful as these two assholes
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-01-10
Updated: 2021-01-10
Packaged: 2021-03-14 18:20:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 25,241
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28675098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aproclivity/pseuds/Aproclivity
Summary: Richard Strand doesn't believe in the touched-based soulmate phenomenon where when two soulmates touch they immediately have the urge to have sex. Never the less he hasn't touched anyone since his wife went missing twenty years ago. Alex Reagan is the first person he'd ever considered letting touch him since then. However for all his protesting about fate not being real, they can't fight it. After an accidental touch, Strand is cruel and Alex is angry but they can't leave one another alone. Or: the soulmate au where they spent two years denying it and hurting one another in the process.
Relationships: Alex Reagan/Richard Strand, Amalia Chenkova/Alex Reagan, Amalia Chenkova/Nic Silver, Coralee Strand/Richard Strand
Comments: 5
Kudos: 9





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

  * For [ZombieBabs](https://archiveofourown.org/users/ZombieBabs/gifts).
  * Inspired by [we belong to you and me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27034612) by [perfect_little_fool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfect_little_fool/pseuds/perfect_little_fool). 



> Hey Babs! Happy holidays! I hope you enjoy your fic featuring psychic and denying the hell out of it Strand, soulmates and fixing some of the holes in canon. This fic (or at least the soulmate mechanic of it) was inspired by [We Belong to You and Me](https://archiveofourown.org/works/27034612) by [perfect_little_fool](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perfect_little_fool/pseuds/perfect_little_fool) which is a wonderful Josh/Donna The West Wing Fic. That fic is explicit. This one isn’t! (It’s why I asked in chat!) While both Alex and Richard are exceptionally bitey in this fic, it definitely does have a happy ending with Strand having a full on Darcy moment, so I hope you enjoy it! Thanks for making amazing content all these years and being awesome! (Also sorry for the length!)
> 
> Also this fic has a playlist which can be found: [here on Spotify](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/1wdUKFJsjC2ysYN8dUktYs) and with an additional song not avalaible on spotify on [Youtube.](https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLZNHYU4RSbnvzGbujnwaetgMAa2eZKKzT)

Dr. Richard Strand of the Strand Institute doesn’t touch people. There are many rumors about this of course, and Strand cultivated those rumors as much as he could. Being described as a germaphobe or rude or an asshole was infinitely better than having the truth be known. Most people familiar with either his reputation or his work or both fortunately didn’t press the issues. They didn’t offer their hands to be shaken or look disappointed when Strand himself didn’t offer his own. Alex Reagan managed to somehow do both when she’d entered his office. For someone who was supposed to be familiar with the things that he’d spoken about, his work and his personal life, she’d ignored the boundary that Strand had created around himself for the last almost twenty years. 

The last nearly twenty years had been the reason for his innate desire not to touch anyone. After Coralee, after he’d been so wrong about the entire soulmate paradigm, Strand refused to believe in the entire nonsense any longer. Too many people, he’d argued in papers that were submitted to journals, were simply taken in around the fairytale mythology of finding one’s soulmate simply because the two of them were fooled by a basic physical attraction. Many times he’d argued that it led to manipulative, heteronormative relationships that were based in the biological and scientific need for procreation rather than anything that was actually approaching love. Too many people conflated the two and it led to nothing more than people fooling themselves that the introductory lust of attraction for something like a fairytale happy ever after. 

Never mind that once upon a time (and it always needed to be once upon a time, because that’s how those sorts of stories always began) Richard Strand had done the same thing when Coralee Jacobson had touched his fingers when she’d taken a young Charlie from him so he could end up getting out her bottle from his bag. They’d touched fingers and Coralee had smiled beautifully and Strand had felt both his heart and his groin flutter. He’d wanted her then and from the way that she’d leaned over and kissed him, Coralee had wanted him too. It was too bad that over their thirteen year marriage, it had become apparent that whatever Strand had thought of his marriage being true love, it definitely wasn’t. It’s difficult to consider someone your soulmate when they were out having an affair and sleeping with more than just yourself. 

And the sex should have been better, even towards the end. 

Looking into the doe eyes of one earnest believer, Strand can already tell that she is someone who believes in that whole soulmate nonsense. While she looks disappointed, she takes it with good grace. 

Later, he will blame her discovery of the Tapes as to why Strand throws her out of his office. He will never admit the truth to himself: _he very much wanted to touch her too_. 

Still Strand calls her back when he’s headed to Seattle. Alex Reagan and her show are a tool that he’s aware he can use in order to flush out the Ceonophus and all of the idiots who are obsessed with his father’s work. Bringing her a tape (and damn did he laugh when he heard her describing them as _The Black Tapes_ for her show; it was the most melodramatic thing he’d heard in a long time and Strand is well aware of what a dramatic person he is) Strand tells himself that he doesn’t need to touch her. He tells himself that it’s just been too long since a beautiful woman paid him any attention and that he’d found one fascinating in return. He’s fairly certain that everyone they meet falls a little bit in love with Alex Reagan, from priests to Sheriffs—Los Gatos' sheriff came the closest that Strand has been to punching someone in a like time; that man was obnoxious in how he responded to Alex and yet he still reached for her hand and held it for a long time despite the disdain in his voice. Alex didn’t deserve that, and it was a reflex that Strand found himself defending her. On their way out before they had run into Tannis Braun (that _motherfucker_ ) Strand’s fingers had hovered in the air above Alex’s back and he almost had touched her without realizing it. But then Braun was there and he’d jerked away like she was sulfur itself. 

Later (much later) Ruby would describe Los Gatos as playing ‘touch chicken’ with Alex. Privately, Strand partially agrees. He doesn’t think he’s either a good man or a brave man and in everything that happens with Alex there are the two at a constant war with one another. If he was a good man, he wouldn’t touch her for reasonings that form a litany of self doubts in his brain. After all, Richard Strand is too old for Alex Reagan and he’s still married. He’s mired in the depth of things that he only allows Alex glimpses of; just enough to know that there is more so she keeps digging into the story but not enough of the truth. Sometimes in his darker moments as Strand brooded over the fact that Alex was out in the woods with _Braun_ of all people And wondered if he was simply masochistic enough to want to hang close enough to Alex that the possibility of touching her was always literally at arms length. But it’s been easy for him his entire life to run away from his emotions and attachments and Strand knows that he’s a _fucking coward._ So he doesn’t touch Alex: he gestures over her arm and tells himself that he’s content with the molecules of air that separate them—that there’s no such thing as soulmates anyway. 

But at night when he’s alone in his cold hotel bed, the part of Richard that he’s wanted to shed since he was sixteen refuses to be silent. No matter how many times Richard tries to silence Richie’s voice in his head or how drunk he gets, those words haunt him more than any ghost or demon: _but what if she is your soulmate. But what if you could be happy with her? The possibility of having Alex love you isn’t enough._ He drinks more, he becomes sharper and harsher pressing on Alex in new ways. Still Richie’s voice is there when he goes to sleep and when he wakes, and as much as Strand wishes this was simply him taunting himself he knows it’s not that simple. Richie has always been the quiet voice of certainty in his head and it had warned him about Coralee the night before their wedding. It had told him that his missing wife didn’t want to be found. It had told him to tell Alex the truth. Richard Strand is a man who refuses to believe that he’s not the master of his own destiny—he ignores things and trusts the fact even when his world is harsh and jagged shards pressed below his skin. 

So, Richard Strand dismisses the things that he doesn’t want to believe in. He dismisses Alex’s feelings and her heart as if they were nothing even if Richie Strand burns in agony for doing it. Even without meaning too, parts of him soften the blows, letting his laughter crawl over his skin and send it into goosebumps below the armor of his suits. The huffy laugh that Strand makes for Alex isn’t his fingertips (or his mouth. God, sometimes he _burns_ with the need to trace his mouth down the line of her throat and to feel her say his name there through the vibrations within her vocal cords) by he knows that he still touches her with it nonetheless. 

As if the idea of playing touch chicken with Alex wasn’t enough for Strand, he finds himself playing emotional chicken with her as well--tidbits about his father (that bastard. Always _that bastard_ ) come unbidden to his lips even if they’re the practiced and professionally sanitized ones about Howard Strand’s life and occupation and safe things like antiquities rather than being obsessed with a Babyolian Goddess and her _fucking Horn_. Strand lies and tells Alex that he and his father weren’t close as her large dark eyes are kind below the rim of her glasses and he can see the empathy there and it makes him want to vomit in his mouth. Of course Alex Reagan would think the best of that Monster! (Even if that night Richie’s voice reminds him that Alex doesn’t know about Howard unless Richard told him. _They_ are the psychic here, not Alex.) But it’s not simply his father. Alex comes to him bearing gifts that drip against his skin like acid. Charlie’s voice for the first time since he’d been in the courthouse to sign the papers over to her grandparents, and at first it’s just as sharp and bitter as it was then, but it softens and is distracted and Strand can’t help but to be reminded when he was trying to be on the phone while getting Charlie ready. But that hadn’t been it, Alex had also managed to convince Charlie to tell her of the last days of his search for his wife, how angry she had been about the affair and how he’d been unable to find Coralee. 

Far worse was when Alex sent the tape of Coralee herself. Despite the voice in his head’s assertion that Alex Reagan wasn’t psychic she was empathic enough to let him hear his wife’s voice for the first time in twenty years (well. New anyway. Richard had enough old tapes of her and Charlie to self flaggate when he felt to punish himself with his wife’s voice when he needed too. His nightmares took care of the times when he didn’t.) alone at his leisure. He’d drank an entire bottle of cheap scotch as he played the words over and over taking shot after shot until he could know longer feel Richie reminding him of his warnings. Then without meaning to because there was some part of Strand that wanted to tell Alex _everything_ , he told her of the affair and she had pushed but accepted giving him the time and space he needed. 

But of course she kept investigating because Alex Reagan shared his pathological need not to leave things alone. It wasn’t simply his wife that she couldn’t leave alone. Strand had been right that Alex would flush things out and she followed different avenues than he did, teasing out the truth and laying the lines that would bring the Cenophus into the open. Even he hadn’t been able to actually talk to a member of the cult and Alex had—more than that, she’d gotten a person inside of the Monastery itself even if she hadn’t been the one to send Dabbic directly. Still it was enough to make his head spin and Strand knew better than to keep staying close to the whirling dervish of Alex Reagan when she was on a scent but he stayed with her anyway even as he denied piece after piece of the truths she dug out from below his heels. 

When Alex sounds so light and happy when she’s talking with Amalia, Strand informs Richie that he’s not jealous--if this woman were her soulmate (not that such things are at all real) then Alex would know it. There’s no way that they’d not touched before, given that she’s Alex and the way that she has a particular glow about her when she tells Strand himself about what her friend had found in Russia. But for a moment, there’s that concern that Amalia would come in and sweep Alex off of her feet. Or Tannis would come back. Or Nicodemus or…. It’s absurd and Richard knows it. He’s no claim to her soul, even if such things were within the realm of possibilities. Still, the jealousy grows and Strand becomes dimly aware that Alex’s influences are far more dangerous than he’d ever given the tiny force of nature credit for. 

What’s even worse is that Alex slides between the soft spots in his armor without even meaning to do it! Oh, Alex Reagan isn’t a saint by any stretch of the imagination, and he’s well aware of the fact that they’re both manipulative with one another. Strand is prepared for those manipulations, studying them and their counters like a grandmaster considers their opponents board to see several moves in advance. If Alex were more rational, it would have been easier for him to prepare for the unexpected.

Alex digs. She digs and dives into each crumb of the story in a sea of doubt and doesn’t emerge until she rises with wishes to ignore Alex discovering that Coralee is alive. Alive and has apparently been in Lake Tahoe under her former college roommate’s name. That feels like as much of a betrayal as her simply just vanishing. Despite the way that he tells Alex about how it’s someone who wishes to capitalize on her show and is making up a story, he knows that Coralee is alive, and flittering in and out of this nightmare with as little care for him as she’d left the first time. Richie protests when Strand rants against Alex for the things that she does. For the questions about the fight that he’d had with his wife when she’d disappeared. _She has to ask those things because she needs to get ahead of the questions that the internet would have for us about her. She was giving you a chance to deny it before we could be in the court of public opinion. Alex is trying to protect us. She is trying to protect **you**_. It’s ridiculous because what Richard Strand needs protection from is Alex Reagan. Alex Reagan and her meddling and everything else that goes along with having her focus--that is the real threat. 

If she gets too close, if Alex loses her balance it would be so easy for her to reach out and grasp him to pull Strand along with her. _Would falling be so bad? Is it so bad to be in love with her?_ Richie’s voice haunts his thoughts when he looks into Alex’s eyes and he can start to see the smudges of sleepless nights painting the pale freckled skin below her glasses, when he watches those bare fingers twitch around the rim of a coffee mug. Knowing that there is every possibility that Stand could destroy Alex as much as she can destroy his carefully constructed facade with all the subtlety of a wrecking ball. Still Alex sparkles when they talk, and Strand knows that his chest puffs out when he can make her laugh, and with the knowledge that Alex doesn’t consider anything beyond the realms of his intellect and knowledge. 

Lying to her with full knowledge of it is the sort of thing that makes Richie loudly protest, but Strand needs to keep the Ceonophus from knowing how he was using Alex to bring them into the open. If he’d been the one to actually mention them, then Alex would have had questions to which Strand doesn’t want to offer answers to. There are explanations that even he agrees that he owes to Alex Reagan, but not yet. No, the discovery needed to be her own and they can take it from there. Even with all of the knowledge that goes along with this, Richard still finds his eyes tracing over her cheek, and mentally he brushes her hair from her face. _Stop being a touch me not, Richard. Stop denying yourself the chance to see what you suspect so much! Stop denying it to Alex! You’re being so stupid! You think that you deserve to not know the truth but that’s bull and we both know it! You have to stop punishing us! All of us! It’s not helping. Denying things never helps! When are you going to learn that, Richard? When are we going to learn it? You can’t control everything. Eventually, it’s going to happen. What will you do when it does?_

Richard denies it of course. He hasn’t touched anyone else in twenty years. He can survive the rest of his life. And Alex will eventually grow tired of the story and move on and that will be best for everyone involved. Even if the thought of not seeing Alex does cause his chest to twist up tightly into a ball in his chest and even if the thought of her with someone else makes him want to vomit. He promises himself (both versions of himself) that Richard is simply never going to touch her. He can’t. 

_You can’t control Alex, Richard. And you can’t control fate._

“There is no such thing as fate.” Richard repeats the words every night as Richie once said his prayers that the shadows and the demons go away. He repeats them aloud to the quiet of his hotel room. He repeats them to the bottom of his glass. He repeats them inside his head when Alex sits across to him and is always careful to leave things on her desk instead of handing it to him. She’s always more careful with _his_ space than _her_ heart and Strand doesn’t need Richie to tell him that. Alex does her best to respect his self imposed exile and Strand lies to himself that this is a good thing and the best thing for them both. 

Richard Strand’s ability to lie is always at its best when it comes to himself. 

But it’s the dizzying laughing way that Alex uses his first name that feels more like a prelude to a touch than anything that Richard has experienced before. His mind divides itself, picturing her below him in the expensive sheets of the hotel bed as she cries out his name with pleasure while he sits there and has the expectation that something is about to irrevocably change between them. 

The change however, doesn’t come with Alex touching him, no matter how much of a mix of relief and disappointment that was there hadn’t been some sort of accidental brush of skin between them. Instead, it comes in the form of three words that Richard Strand will hate and lace with scorn for the rest of his life: _sexy James Bond._ Even when the jealousy threatens to crawl out of his throat, Strand works to tamp it down and ignore it. It’s the worst kind of jealousy and he knows it: it’s the sort of jealousy that comes from a direct and cold fear. Yes, a good part of it is fear _for_ Alex and his getting her involved so deeply in this but there is another part of it that comes with the way that he repeats the word ‘only’ back to her after Alex says that she can ‘only describe the man as ridiculously hot’. 

So he runs. Richard runs once again like he does before Alex meets Simon Reese, like he knows that he will run again in the future. It’s not premonition that births the thought—it’s fifty-five years of knowing himself and thirty of being the worst sort of coward. He runs from her question and knowledge that the tapes that he’s shown her are all connected. Strand isn’t proud of the way that he fakes the static over the phone line to buy himself some time to think of an answer for her, and he’s even less proud of how he draws on Alex’s affection for him to buy himself more time before she knows that he’s curated the tapes for her. When Alex knows that he picks and chooses the tapes that were threads of this, when she truly realizes that each one was a test in some way, she’s going to be furious and Strand can’t blame her. He doesn’t know how to explain this to himself in a way that works to alleviate his guilt—never mind her anger. 

_If Alex leaves us it’s going to be all your fault._ Strand knows this just like he knows that it’s always his. Telling Richie that it will be worth the cost to finally know what’s going on feels like a cold comfort indeed. 

Cold comforts still count as comforts for Richard Strand, and that’s why he’s so pleased when they receive word of Edward Lewis’ caption and how he will only speak to Richard himself. Despite how angry Alex is about this development, he feels a sense of forward movement when he arrives in Los Gatos and meets with the man who calls himself ‘Brother.’ There’s a twitching between his shoulder blades that Strand contends is nothing more than just apophenia, but it reminds him to record the interview for Alex. The entire thing leaves him cold even as it slots pieces into place that he’d been searching for for longer than Alex Reagan has been alive. Being able to pretend that he’s not unnerved is one of the things that Richard is the best at, and he’s calm and collected as he discusses the interview that Lewis gave to him. But what Richard had carefully deleted from the recording (after Alex had teased him about the fact that her recorder was digital, he’d gone into a deep dive to learn how it worked so that he wouldn’t be caught off guard again by it) was the ending of the interview and what Lewis had said as he was getting ready to leave. 

“You want so badly to disbelieve, Richard. You’d tried so hard to do so for your entire lonely life. And now everything is spread out before you, all of the answers you seek and so much more than that. But you will keep refusing the gifts of the universe with every fiber of your being. A single brush of a finger is all that it would require and yet you deny yourself even the smallest piece of happiness. That is why you will give into the Advocate--because eventually you will have nothing else.” 

Alex Reagan could be his happiness--Strand isn’t a fool--but he also knows that there are far more important things than happiness in the universe. _Only because you won’t allow us to be truly happy!_ Richie protests loudly as Richard ignores it. So they argue as Alex catches sight of a picture on the television in the studio lobby. He knows who Thomas Warren is, he’s not stupid, but Strand never expected that he would have gotten involved directly in the show and talking to Alex. He never would have expected that Warren would have sat across from Alex (his Alex some parts of him reminds himself) and spoken to her directly and used his own hands to steal Richard’s coffee mug. The amount of danger Strand’s now aware that Alex is in has grown to the sort of amount that makes panic snake along his chest and he needs to take a deep breath before he follows Alex into her office. Making him tea and herself coffee has become a second nature for Alex, and Strand is too stunned to say anything before she puts it in front of him and then sits down in her desk chair. 

As his mind goes a thousand miles a minute, Alex plays the voicemail that had come in while the two of them were arguing about Lewis’ interview. Tina Stevenson has come into the store in Lake Tahoe. Coralee has entered from stage right with all the subtlety of Banquet’s ghost and Strand can see Alex’s face in response to the news. Immediately Strand is on his feet, and in doing so he upsets the mug of freshly made tea that Alex has set in front of him. They both reach for it trying to prevent the other from getting burned, and as they touch the glass, the tips of their fingers just barely brush together. 

The response is immediate. Oh. So that’s what this was supposed to feel like, Strand thinks, and then the thought is gone as his hands wrap around the crooks of Alex’s elbows to draw her into him. Alex doesn’t need to be drawn. Instead, she’s there in the circle of his personal space with her lips pressed against him. Legends have been made of such kisses between soulmates from the very recording of human history, and Strand knows that each and every single one of them is true. There’s a heat in him and for a moment he dimly wonders if the tea managed to burn him after all, but instead it’s just Alex. Alex pressed against him, standing on her tiptoes as she kisses him. Alex as his hands tangle in her hair and her arms wrap around his neck and Alex as her mouth demands entrance to his own, kissing him with an intensity and fire that he’s always imagined to have inside of her. Without thinking about it, he catches the back of her thigh and picks her up to set her on her desk. Each sound is a symphony of mewing want between the two of them and it’s only when she lets out a little hiss of pain that he stops. 

The tea that the two of them had been trying to prevent from scalding the other spilled, and the steaming liquid had seeped into Alex’s jeans and burned her. He’s hurt her— _burned her_ —without meaning too. Alex Reagan would thrust herself into the fire for him and even before she can make the bad joke that is on her lips, Richard slams the door to her office is gone and he’s down the stairs to the garage before Alex can leave her office. Oh, he knows that she’s going to chase him but Strand isn’t going to give her the chance to catch him. 

Both Richie and Strand’s own body protest what he’s doing as he throws his car into drive and peels out of the parking garage. Seeing Alex coming out of the main door to the building doesn’t give him any incentive to slow down; instead he speeds up, taking the sort of right turn that only happens blindly in movies. Alex will give chase, and he knows without knowing that she would go to the hotel. He still has his briefcase and his identification so he doesn’t even head in that direction. Instead he drives at breakneck speeds to SeaTac and leaves his car in the short term parking lot. Before he turns his phone off, he tells the rental car company to find it and this time he ignores the twelve calls that Alex Reagan has made trying to get her to talk to him. 

It’s not until Strand is on his first of two layovers (because when one is taking a headlong flight into the night that they book at the last minute on the most immediate way to get them the hell out of a city the odds of a direct flight are astronomically low) that he turns on his phone and calls Alex. From the way that she answers before the first ring is even completed, Richard knows that she’d been sitting there and holding her phone waiting for this call. Her voice is breathless, and he can feel the heat from it moving over his skin even here in the cold of the Minneapolis St. Paul Airport. “Richard…” _Fuck_ , it shouldn’t sound so good to hear her say his name like that. It shouldn’t make him want to simply turn around and crawl on his hands and knees all the way back to Seattle to beg her for forgiveness and to take him back and kiss him again like she had before he’d run away. Kissing Alex Reagan and the need to kiss her again had been the least rational thing he’d ever done in his life, and Richard Strand doesn’t crawl on his hands and knees for anyone. He’s not going to start now. 

The familiar sound of her recorder starting offers Strand more steel for his spine, and he doesn’t say her name before he starts speaking all of the arctic and ice of Dr. Strand there in his voice. Richie, for the first time since he’d heard Alex Reagan’s voice is entirely silent and Richard doesn’t know if it’s a different level of mourning than for what he is going to do now or not. Killing that little voice would simply be one more cost of the tiny reporter, even if she isn’t even aware that’s what he’s doing. Or maybe it was simply that Richie couldn’t bear the cost of hearing this happen--Richard doesn’t know and in the end it doesn’t matter. “I feel like you're misrepresenting me and everything I stand for.” The raise in Alex’s anger levels is audible, and line after line Richard fan’s those flames. Every cruel trick that his father had ever taught him, every single way Strand had learned how to cut someone to the quick, to destroy every single thing about them is deployed with a laser precision that he can’t help but to wonder if his father would finally be proud of the mess that he’s currently making so that Alex Reagan will never come anywhere near him again. 

If there’s one lesson that Howard Strand has taught Richard more than any other, it’s that it’s better to be angry than hurting. He just wished that it wasn’t a lesson that Alex still needed to learn. 

“ ** _This isn't some kind of game, Alex._** ” He tells himself her hurt doesn’t hurt him, when she questions what he says about it. Instead he takes it and amplifies that pain from her, using it against the two of them. “ ** _A game; a whodunnit. Some salacious mystery to draw in your listeners, to attract downloads or whatever it is._** ”

Maybe Richard should have expected that Alex would have been able to use the double side of that knife in return: **_“If Coralee's alive... that changes everything.”_**

“ ** _Does it_**?” Richard doesn’t even need to make himself more angry with those frozen two words, or the words that follow it. “ ** _For who? Exactly whose life changes if she's alive? Yours? Your producer Nic's? Whose life changes_**?” 

“ ** _Well, I'm not sure it's as simple as that…._** ” He can feel her hurt and her pain and it slices itself all the way into his bones when she responds in the most careful and most open way, trying to shield both of them from what that touch had meant for them, and in doing so Alex gives Richard the greatest weapon he can have in this. Despite the way that he now has this nuclear option, Strand can’t bring himself to say anything until he hears his name in her soft and worried voice once more “Richard?” 

He hates himself for what he’s going to do. He hates himself and he knows that he deserves it when Alex hates him to. “You seem to be laboring under some false misconception that the touch between the two of us meant something, Ms. Reagan. That whatever nonsense of soulmates that exists within your mind is real. Allow me to assure you that it is not. Soulmates are nothing more than fairy tales for the simple minded who refuse to see that their lack of meaningful romantic relationships is the fault of their own flaws and no one else’s. It’s far too easy for the gullible to believe that something as simple as sexual attraction is the basis for some sort of cosmic and fated all consuming great love. It’s just sex and biology. Nothing more.” 

“ _How can you say that_?” Alex’s voice has teeth constructed of pain and sadness in it, and Strand’s mind’s sight allows him to see the way that her eyes go liquid with angry tears. “How can you say that what just happened is nothing more than just sex and biology, Richard. I’m not some naive blushing virgin who is moping in her bedroom. That’s not just sexual attraction and you know it! We’re soulmates. That doesn’t change just because you’re fucking pissed off about that, Richard! You’re just being a fucking coward.” 

“Just because you believe me to be your soulmate, Ms. Reagan, doesn’t mean that you are mine.” The sharp intake of pained breath nearly drives Richard to his knees, and it strangles the breath within his own lungs and he knows that if he needs to listen to Alex sob, then he’s never going to be able to truly leave her. So before she can truly respond, Richard just simply says “Goodbye, Alex,” because even though he knows that he shouldn’t say her name aloud, he can’t prevent himself from saying it one final time. 

Honestly, Richard Strand doesn’t remember how he gets back to Chicago. He doesn’t remember how he manages to find himself in his sterile white modern apartment building with the city spread below him. What he does remember is the first time that he tries to sleep in the luxurious confines of his large bed with its many thread count sheets and the quiet certainty that Alex isn’t sleeping. He remembers how he takes the blanket off of his bed and lays on the carpeted floor. He remembers trying to sleep and time stretching out in front of him endlessly as he paces up and down the hallways of the place that somehow seems drastically less a home than the generic hotel room that the company that procured his services had put him in Seattle. In the end, the desperate search for Coralee is as much about trying to bury his feelings for Alex Reagan as it is for finding the missing wife who’d abandoned him.

One by one, giving up all of the fine things that he’d loved since he’d buried Richie the first time fell away as a form of penance for what he’d done to Alex. He stops wearing his bespoke suits and eating at the high end places that he’d used to frequent. The fancy tea collection that he’d always kept (overly) full of tea dwindles and wanes until there’s nothing left but basic tea bags that he drinks bitter, black and overbrewed. When Strand sleeps, it’s on the uncomfortable sofa in his office, and eventually sleep and food themselves become luxuries as well. Richard runs from one place to the next, spending money that he never would have dreamed of spending before in order to trace whatever leads exist to find Coralee. He keeps his phone off, and tells Ruby to inform everyone (but especially Alex Reagan) that he’s gone and no one knows when he’s going to be back even as he can hear Ruby talking to her on the other side of his office door. 

Every single time, Richard goes to stand on the other side of the polished walnut door and he strains to hear through it, desperate for some sound of her voice. Oh, Alex calls. He knows that she calls. At first there had been messages that left those first eleven of hers vastly outnumbered. The messages had been angry and sharp and bitter at first, and he’d listened to every one of them over and over, letting them claw their way into his heart so deeply that he’d never be free of them. Eventually, Alex’s anger had burned itself out, and there was a quiet resignation as she’d begged him to just let her know that he’s alright. Those messages are listened to once and then deleted--they don’t hurt enough. Eventually, she stops leaving the messages for him, even though Richard knows that Alex still calls, even if it’s just to listen to his outgoing voicemail. Ruby just scowls and tells him every time that she should just get him a new phone number that Alex doesn’t have but he can’t do that either. Maybe it’s crueler to keep the same number and message, but Richard wants Alex to be able to leave him a message on his actual phone if that’s what she wants to do. 

Even if Nic hadn’t told Ruby (which isn’t something that Strand is even willing to try and unpack frankly) that Alex was still investigating everything he knew that was what she was going to do. Alex Reagan didn’t give up on things or on people even when they would have preferred that she did (even if Richard knows himself well enough to know that he always wants what he can’t have) and she’s definitely not the sort of person to let a story this big go. Tendrils of Alex’s story sneak themselves into his orbit and Richard tries to break the webbing between them when he’s cruel to Rebecca Yi when she emails him. Alex will find out about it, he’s certain and he hopes that will bank up her anger all over again. 

Richard really should have expected what Alex does next, even if he hadn’t thought that she would in a million years. 

Really, he should have known something was going to happen when the night before he’d finally heard Richie for the first time in six months. _You can’t keep doing this to yourself. You’re going to die if you don’t sleep and eat._ Strand doesn’t bother to reply, not even when Richie’s voice is softer and kinder, the bleeding heart of a boy he once had been. _It’s okay to miss her, Richard. You love her, and she loves you!_

“Yeah?!” Richard snarls the world into the early morning dimness of his office. “When has our loving anyone ever really been anything but hurt for the people we cared about?! You think that love is the most important thing in the world and that makes you just as foolish as Alex Reagan!” Coupling the words with a toss of his tepid tea against the wall, Richard refuses to hear anything else from the boy as he pulls out a bottle of scotch and doesn’t surface from it until he can’t tell if he’s hearing Alex in his dreams or in reality. 

But Ruby Carver has never bled into his dreams before and Richard lurches into both being awake and sobriety as he hears his assistant trying to put Alex off. It’s a rookie mistake, especially considering that the reporter is here, but Ruby leaves her alone in his office. The traitorous beating of his heart pounds so loudly that he’s almost certain that Strand has found himself within the confines of a story by Poe rather than one by Pacific Northwest Stories. Still, he can feel the joy in the confines of his chest and Richard can’t help but to wonder if Alex feels it too, if her heart is overflowing with the knowledge that they were so close after such a long time. Each night that they’d been apart, Richard had been haunted by her, the taste of coffee and heat in his mouth, the siren song of the little cries of desire that she’d made, the feeling of her arms around his neck and his hands tangled within her hair. Each microsecond of those kisses between them was writ large into decades and centuries, and there was the promise, finally of more. 

Or at least there would be if Richard allowed himself that. But Alex Reagan is more important than to let himself. So, Richard spins the chair, so that it appears empty when Alex comes into his office, and he holds his breath as his pulse rips through his veins singing ‘ _we’re here, we’re here, we’re here!_ ’ But the sound of the startled and concerned “oh” from Alex draws him back into reality, and Richard knows that he should be relieved when Ruby tells Alex that she shouldn’t be in here. Knowing Alex (and he does) Richard can tell that she’s winding up to argue with his assistant and it’s not as if he’s got a teleporter so that he can escape from the confines of his bunker-like office without her knowing that he’s here. Despite knowing and being that he’s a coward, Richard isn’t stupid and he doesn’t want to appear to be stupid in front of Alex either. 

So, Richard turns in the chair (despite how foolish he feels for it) and just says, “ ** _It’s okay Ruby._** ” Despite the way that his voice feels rusty from disuse, Strand knows that it’s not as simple as all of that, because when he looks into Alex’s face and can see the dark shadows that have carved themselves below her eyes in ways that match his own he’s reminded of what the cost is for anyone who knows him. The breathless little hi that she gives him in response cuts on a dual path into his groin and into his heart, but Richard still continues on speaking anyway. Being ruled by his emotions is one thing that Howard Strand had impressed dearly on his son, and those lessons had been costly indeed but it means that he can approach this situation much more calmly and dispassionately than Alex herself can. “ ** _Please sit down_** ,” Strand begins, and he pauses as Alex just stares into his face, her own an etching of disbelief. “ ** _I need your help._** ” 

The silence stretches between them for a long time, and from the way that Alex fidgets with her recorder, she’s well aware of both the fact that it’s running and how precarious the situation is between them. Still, she’s unable to keep the quiet anger and uncertainty from her tone. “ ** _I’ve been calling._** ” 

“ ** _I’ve been busy._** ” It’s so familiar and old hat, and Richard knows that it’s going to play that way to her audience even if it’s not going to for the two of them. 

“ ** _I can see that._** ” Watching the anger drag itself into her shoulders almost against her will, Richard knows that they can’t talk about this without _talking_ about this. So he knows what he needs to do, and he pitches his voice softer as he takes a step closer to Alex. 

“ ** _Can you turn that off? The recorder. I want to speak with you, but this has to be off the record._** ” 

Alex’s dark eyes burn into his own, and Strand feels a pang of horror that maybe what he’d done had finally convinced her that everything that he’d said about their being soulmates was true. At the very least, when she speaks, Alex is drawing on professionalism that he’d never would have thought that she would have been able to do when he’d run away from her. “ ** _It’s just…I don’t know how it’ll affect--_** ” Affect what? Their audience? Their relationship? Strand doesn’t know, but what he does know is that he can’t talk about this with her on the record, for any number of reasons. 

So, Richard just insists, letting his plea color into his voice, “ ** _Please._** ” Taking a step closer to her, his voice drops even further, as he watches the pain and worry and yes, hope shifts through her eyes like clouds being pushed by a strong storm. “ ** _Please. I’ll explain once the recorder is off._** ” Despite the tone of voice, Alex still questions him about his wife and his daughter, before she makes the decision and there’s an audible click of the recorder turning off. 


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After Richard hurts her and runs from her, Alex tries to put the pieces back together. Or: why she's such a mess for the entirety of season two.

Alex Reagan has always believed in soulmates. At her core, after all she’s a woman who wants to believe and has been searching for something to believe in. Yes, she’s well aware of the fact that for most of the people in this world, soulmates are as common as actual demons in Strand’s black tapes. While he had never addressed it directly—and never needed to because Alex had known him well enough for that—Strand disbelieved in them as much as he disbelieved in everything else that she was uncovering. It was all too easy for her to imagine the scoff that he would have given her when it came to the question. So Alex never asked it, even as she respected him too much to actually touch him in order to prove it one way or another. 

But they had touched. They had touched and they had kissed and the two of them were well on their way to having sex before the tea had spilt and Strand just vanished into the wind. Going to try and stop him had been second nature—it was so easy and yet his fleeing had carved a place against her ribs that she’d felt with each echoing beat of her heart. Going to his hotel had been a fruitless endeavor; Alex had sat in the lobby of the building and tried to breath long past the time when the rest of the throng had thinned out leaving just Alex there in the dark with her thoughts. Richard Strand was gone and he was gone without coming even to collect the suits of his that he loved. 

In the end there was nothing for Alex to do but to go back to her apartment. She couldn’t face her office, not yet. Facing her office meant that eventually she would need to face the loss of him too. So as time pressed onwards, Alex kept calling and hoping that he would eventually pick up. Surely given the eleven calls that Alex had already placed he _had_ to know that she simply wasn’t going to let this go! Letting this go when it had simply been a story was difficult enough but now there was this too. Richard Strand is her soulmate and he’s going to eventually have to come to terms with that. There’s nothing else for him to do, or so Alex had thought. 

Having the phone in her hand and already starting to dial the phone from memory, Alex had startled and it had been a reflex that had been ingrained in her since before she’d even met Richard Strand. The file would be fine; she’d get it into the editing suite before Nic even knew of its existence. But she didn’t expect him to fight. She didn’t expect the rage that she knew Strand was causing her on purpose but found herself rising to the bait anyway. Richard Strand lashes out for lots of reasons and Alex is aware of that, but the angry and matter of fact way that he slides the knife between her ribs knocks the wind out of her, and Alex doesn’t know how to deal with that. 

“ _Just because you may believe I am your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ”

Alex isn’t normally a crier not like this. But after there’s the sound of nothing in her ear following his goodbye, she just sits there and sobs. Sobbing until the orange and pink of dawn in Seattle starts to peek through her windows and she’s run out of tears, Alex just sits there. Eventually, at a reasonable time, she calls Nic and tells him that she’s taking a long weekend. The stretch of four days doesn’t seem possible to mourn the possibility of a relationship but Alex is very much aware of the fact that if Nic catches even a whiff of this it’s over for her. Attraction and flirting between a reporter and a subject is barely tolerated; adding love to the equation would be so much of a violation of ethics that he’d have to fire her. 

So by the time Alex comes in to meet with Nic for her postseason interview, she’s got an immaculately clean apartment and a plan. This story is too important to her both personally and professionally to let it go. Strand will come back, because he can’t not come back and the two of them will be able to figure this out like adults. Investigation comes as easily as breathing to Alex Reagan, and throwing herself into work is second nature. Nic doesn’t question it at all as she keeps diving deeper into the story and into Daeva Corp and Warren and everything else. She produces Tanis and it keeps her just as busy as her own show would. She still calls Richard, even when the messages she leaves him don’t work and for all Alex knows, he deletes them unheard. But his number and his outgoing message doesn’t change and Alex tries to find some peace with that. Whatever form of lines of communication between Nic and Ruby is as intact as ever, and Alex leaves Strand’s assistant to Nic. 

Eventually, Rebecca Yi stops her outside of the studio, and Alex listens as she tells her story. Putting it to tape is the easiest thing for Alex to do, and she dives into what is happening around Katie. In many ways, it simply feels as if Strand is back in Chicago or at a conference or whatever the hell else. It’s only when Rebecca mentions that she’d emailed the Strand Institute (and that she’d received a response when so many of Alex’s own emails and messages have gone unanswered!) that Alex’s professional mask slips. “ ** _What did he say?_** ” She doesn’t mean to hold her breath, and Richard’s voice just breathes in over her, causing a fresh pain like pushing on a toothache. 

“ _Just because you may believe I am your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ”

Strand doesn’t need to be there for Alex to know what he said in response to the video that she’s watching. Reciting it back from memory, Rebecca just admits that’s what he’d said. The laugh that Alex makes in response is far too cynical for her and she hates it about herself, but she can’t change it, not when she can’t even talk to him about the smallest bit of cases. But Alex can’t focus on herself and her pain when Rebecca Yi is in front of her begging for help. Someone begging for her help (or just _asking_ for it honestly) is a weakness, and Alex’s work in the story now serves a dual purpose as she attempts to lessen Rebecca’s nightmares even as Alex’s grow. Giving her friend’s number as a psychologist is easy, even as Alex needs to grapple with whether or not the show itself is causing apophenia. How people might dig into the story is something that Alex never considered before, and it’s one more note in a symphony of terror when she tries to close her eyes. 

Alex doesn’t sleep anymore, not really. Her thoughts race forward, and when Alex does sleep, none of her dreams are good ones. In some, the demons from the tapes crawl across her walls, looming large and having teeth as they menace her. In other’s Alex is finally having sex with Richard Strand. Sometimes it’s on the desk in her office, sometimes it’s in her apartment, sometimes it’s just the two of them out on a case, and he tells her he loves her as he kisses her throat. The last kind of dream doesn’t have Alex leaping awake in terror. Instead, Alex wakes up sobbing with her ears echoing words that are all too familiar: “ _Just because you may believe I am your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ” Sometimes the dreams even combine with him saying that to her after he gets off and leaves her there wanting with an ache in both her groin and her heart. 

“ _Just because you may believe I am your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ” It’s the saddest song that Alex knows and she wishes with everything inside of her that she could forget it. 

There is a certain inevitability to things that the lack of sleep affords Alex. As much as she wants to be surprised that Daeva Corp is probably behind Strand’s teaching position she’s not. Nor is she surprised that Richard has very likely been living out of his office. Needing this to seem mostly like Nic’s idea, Alex had waited for him to almost suggest it before she jumped into booking her flight to Chicago. Each step from the studio to the Strand Institute seems like it takes a thousand years. Even when Ruby denies that Strand is there, there’s a growing sense of urgency inside of her. Richard may not be here now, but he will be and Alex intends to be inside of his office waiting for him to finally face her. Instead, Alex finds herself face to face with a conspiracy board that wouldn’t be out of place on an internet meme, and she follows the lines of thread across clipping and documents. Each stringed link was unexpected, even if Alex didn’t have time to actually go through them, and a terrible fear for him comes over her. Had she broken him? Had her kiss really been that bad that he’d turn into this? The fear only grows when Alex hears the rusty tones of his voice for disuse. 

Whirling towards him quickly, her eyes go wide and Alex lets the recorder in her hand dangle on the thin bones of her wrist. He looks terrible. He looks tired. He looks like how Alex feels without makeup and it’s the most beautiful sight that she’s ever seen. All of the words that Alex is so famous for fails her for a long moment as the two of them just stare at one another with the silence seeming oppressive even as he asks for her help. Asking for Alex’s help takes her back, and she finds footing in the familiar style of an old fight as if Alex can’t feel the thrumming of her heart beating in perfect time with his own. 

But nothing takes her back as much as Richard asking her to turn off the recorder. As long as the recorder is running whatever lines they cross are more clearly defined. The recorder is a shield between them Alex is clearly reluctant to release. It’s only when Richard asks her again that she turns it off and drops it back into the pocket of her messenger bag. “You left me.” Despite how much Alex wants to keep the hurt from her tone she can’t—it’s there and written in boldface as her dark eyes meet his blue ones. 

“Yes.” 

Alex doesn’t expect the answer, nor the softness in it. She doesn’t expect how she can feel his voice curling low in her belly and she bites her lip before she shakes her head. “You kissed me and then you left and it’s been months! You didn’t think that you should have at least sent a text message letting me know you’re alive?! What the hell, Richard?! How could you do that.”

“Alex—“ She hates the way that it feels when Strand says her name in that voice, and the two of them are as far apart as they can be, hugging the walls with an ocean of the same between them. 

“Don’t! Don’t ‘Alex’ me and act so put upon, Richard. Don’t try and manipulate me now. I don’t deserve that! You hurt me! Do you understand how much I was hurting?!”

Richard makes the first move, one of his heavy sighs as he sinks back into the familiar warmth of his desk chair. He runs one hand over his disheveled beard before he speaks. “I know I did, Alex. But I did it for your own good.”

“My own good?!” Alex wants to scream and shout at him, and she wants to slap him and throw things at him. “Do you know what this feels like? To have someone you love run away from you like this? To just leave you without a word?”

“Yes.” The word is simple and resigned as he watches her, and Alex feels more than a little stab of regret. If there’s someone who knows how this feels it would be him, after Coralee had left. 

Despite feeling like an asshole, Alex can’t stop what comes out of her mouth next—it’s soft and pained and it feels tiny when she speaks. “Then you of all people should know how much this hurts, Richard.” But still Alex sinks into the chair that she’d first sat in when she’d arrived in the Strand Institute and she drops her head into her hands. 

“Alex—“ he starts her name and then he stops and she’s so very aware of how close they are and how much closer they _could_ be if they just allowed themselves to do so. “Whatever you may think, whatever you may _believe_ it’s not what you think it is. What happened between us is simply a result of the way that we had been flirting. It was an attraction based on both of us being touch-starved and vulnerable. Nothing more, it's a simple matter of biology. We are not animals, Alex. We have no need to simply give into our instincts.”

“Oh my god is that really what you think of me? That I would jeopardize my entire life simply because I needed a good fuck? Do you really think that I’m that _stupid_?!”

“No! We simply got carried away. It was us and it was the flirting between us. I sincerely apologize for letting it get that far. It won’t happen again. It _can’t_ happen again, Alex. Whatever it was is something that you have to put out of your mind. I wasn’t lying when I said I needed your help.”

“Did you think of me,” Alex whispers. “At all, the entire time you were gone? Did you think that everything was fine without you?”

“It was fine without me. You were fine without me. But you need to stop seeing things that aren’t there and assigning meaning to them.”

“If you tell me what happened between us was just _apophenia_ ,” Alex spits the word at him in a hiss. “I’m going to punch you in the face.”

“There is no need for violence, Alex.” Even if her hand is curled into a tight ball at her side, even if she can feel every muscle and tendon in her arm tense with the kinetic energy and the need to throw the punch. Alex feels sick, especially when he continues talking. “And there’s no need to discuss it further. I am asking for your help and it’s up to you if you can put this behind you for the sake of your story or not.”

Alex isn’t an idiot. She knows what she should say to this request that seems just as designed to hurt her as everything else that had happened in the last few months. Telling Richard to fuck off is the very minimum of what he deserves and the punch in the face that she’d threatened feels very much on the table as Alex stares into his eyes. God, the worst thing on the planet isn’t demons or what’s happening to those kids. It’s not that she can’t sleep or how he’s lied to her. No, the worst and most cruel thing on the planet is that Alex Reagan is still in love with him and she’s never going to stop being in love with him—that doesn’t happen when it comes to something both metaphysical and just plain physical as being soulmates are. Richard Strand has the will to deny it and Alex knows it and she doesn’t know if she does. But as much as Alex is going to hate herself over this and as much as she knows that the best thing that she can do is to put distance between them, Alex just can’t. She can’t be the one to walk away from him like he has done to her. She can’t leave him when he’s asking for her help even if he had chosen to do the same to her over and over again over the last months. 

“What do you need?” Alex’s voice is a soft sigh and she swallows around the granite that she knows shines in her throat. “What’s going on?” 

Richard just sighs as he explains and Alex can’t help but wonder if Richard plans to just speak to her in nothing but sighs given how many he’s making. “I’ve been being stalked, Alex. That’s not new—I’ve had several since I started the Institute. But this stalking...this _series_ of stalkers goes back beyond that. I believe that there are certain… _groups_ that believe in the occult. They believed that my father had documents and artifacts related to this.. _.pursuit_ of his. They are desperate to get them, and will do whatever it takes to secure them.” 

“What kind of artifacts and documents?” It’s far too easy for Alex to slip into that same questioning pattern as the usual, on this time, she knows that Richard isn’t going to end with him saying that whatever is happening isn’t real. This is all too real, and it feels it with his sense of urgency passing between the two of them like current from a live wire. 

“I’m not sure,” it pains him to admit it, Alex can tell, and he very quickly adds: “if I had known what they were looking for, I would have destroyed it long ago.” 

“What are you expecting me to do here, Richard?” 

“I need you to look into things for me. Chase leads, do some searches on the internet. This is a matter of safety, Alex. I swear to you I’m not lying about that. Since your show started, there is a more intense level of scrutiny on me than ever before. You managed to find things--people-- that I never dreamed that you would. I’m not merely worried about my own safety, Alex. I can take care of myself. But I’m worried about Charlie.” His blue eyes stare into her own when he says the next piece, and the truth of it is so tangible that it wraps around Alex like a shackle, holding her in place here even when it’s Alex’s urge to run. “I’m worried about _you_.”

“If you're worried about me then why involve me even further? That’s not logical.” The words have teeth and claws, and they match the flint in Alex’s eyes and the set line of her jaw. 

“I know you, Alex. I know that you’re not going to leave this alone until it’s finished. Even if that’s what you should do.” His voice is so certain like he’s claiming to know her so damned well that he can just pluck on her strings and make her fall into line. 

“God, you sound so fucking smug. It’s like you want to lay claim to some piece of what happened before and ignore what happens to be inconvenient to you and just have your cake and eat it too? So what happens in this fantasy of yours that we’re both able to ignore what’s between us? And even if you wanna pretend it’s not soulmates you can’t deny that there’s something there. Hell, I can see that your hands are shaking with how badly you want to touch me and how badly you want me to touch you.”

“We lasted this long, Alex. Our wills are iron. We ignore and we work together until the story is done. Until I can be certain that you are Charlie both are safe. Then you can do whatever you want. You’ll never see me again. In the meantime, you’ll go back to Seattle and work the story from there. I’ll stay here and do the same. There are telephones and Skype and email and everything else, Alex we can do this story perfectly fine with rarely meeting face to face.”

For a moment Alex just sits there stunned as she stares at him. Something hurts in her chest, twisting and shattering as he lays out his plan so methodically. Exhaustion leeches into Alex’s voice as she just sits back in the chair. “God. You really aren’t the person I thought you were, Richard. You’re not the man I thought you were who believed in the truth above everything else. Can you really just go through your life not knowing if your soulmate is sitting right here wanting you to kiss her more than anything?”

Strand’s voice is gruff and harsh and hard as a unrefined diamond. “Well, I’ll be sure to add your name to the list of people I’ve disappointed, Ms. Reagan. I can assure you that it’s quite a long one.” He doesn’t answer the question about happiness and Alex isn’t surprised as much as she wishes that she was. 

Shaking her head, Alex pulls out her recorder again. If Richard Strand wants Alex Reagan reporter then that’s what he’s going to get. So they talk around it, both of them refusing to meet the other’s eyes. At least the two of them sound exhausted and pained and that would be easy enough to pass it off as tensions related to the show and not something else. It’s only when she asks about Ruby and Strand (because he needs to be Strand now) says he wants to keep her away from all of this that Alex almost cracks. Almost, but she manages to hold herself together at the very last moment even in the face of what he says next. “ ** _You and I….we have a—_** ”

“ _Just because you may believe I’m your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ”

Alex’s heart breaks as she cuts him off, because if she has to listen to whatever clinical bullshit he’s planning on describing the situation as she’s going to break and none of this is going to work. So instead, Alex’s voice is quiet when she just replies. “ ** _Yeah_**.”

His lips move into a frown even as Alex could tell that Strand has relied there among the edges of it. With a voice almost more quiet than Alex had ever heard it before, he asked her one more time and both of them know that it’s far more than simply investigating things. It’s everything—every heart breaking piece of it. “ ** _So you’ll do it?_** ”

“ ** _Yes_** ,” Alex agrees because she can’t help but to do so. She loves with her whole heart, even if he doesn’t love her back and she can’t leave Strand with this on his own. “ ** _I’ll do it_**.”

It’s easy for Alex then to go back to Seattle. She takes the lumps that Nic gives her with only a token amount of protest, even as she fights to keep the fact that there is a secret between herself and Strand in the show. It needs to be, and Alex knows it otherwise this entire scheme is going to fall apart. Losing Strand is going to be—is—bad enough and she can’t lose her career on top of it. The secret of Strand’s family is one that will cover all manner of sins and Alex knows this. Diving deeper into this madness is the only way through and Alex really didn’t need the extra incentive of solving the story so that in the end Richard Strand is out of her life, but it helps. It helps when Alex chases down cruel booksellers who play games with demons and sleep therapists and deers that have too many legs from woods that are all too familiar. The Brothers of the Mount and their spell book loom large in Alex’s nightmares and there isn’t anything that she can do as night after night she tries to chase sleep and it’s as much of a phantom as anything else. 

Paradoxically, the best and worst parts of her day was when Strand called. Keeping everything above board, Alex dutifully puts every bit of their conversation on tape. Everything on the record, even when she could feel the tightness in her chest when he sounds so terrible. He’s distracted, and he doesn’t even mention anything about them. Not knowing where the hell Strand is on the planet is becoming a thing that she’s needed to get used to, and even through the phone lines, Alex can tell how exhausted he is on whatever meeting he’s on his way to. The impatience of his demand grates on her, even when Strand finally makes at least something of a concession that there is something on the video, even if he passes the actual science part onto a different expert that they need to use. What she’s not used to is the way that he doesn’t even bother to say goodbye before he hangs up. 

So Alex finds the connection that ties his residency to Daeva Corp. Nic tries to reassure her that Strand will come around, but the eching void in her chest refuses to believe that he will. At least not in the way that Alex wants and needs him to. 

Amalia comes back and it’s so easy for Alex to fall into bed with her ex; if she can’t sleep then at least she can forget about Strand and how he should be the one touching her. But the woman who she’d loved before is different somehow in ways that Alex can’t quite put her finger on. She’s different in the way her mouth presses against Alex, and in the way that she makes her climax. But no matter how boneless and satiated Amalia makes her, sleep remains elusive. Holding the secret of that touch and kiss between herself and Strand weighs on her, and it’s one more thing that Alex can’t tell anyone about--not even Dr. Bernier, considering Alex is trying to do everything that she can to keep things above board. Every poor decision seems to compound the one at the very crux of this and for the first time Alex understands that the denial of this is something that can actually cause a person to be driven into madness. 

Like a penance, Alex admits to the way that her judgment is clouded and broken right now. Each admission feels like it should lighten the burden of what’s smothering her heart, but it doesn’t. There’s not even a release that comes from actually saying aloud that she can hear Strand’s voice in her head and that he’d tell her that all of this was apophenia but that’s not what he says in the darkest parts of night in the darkest parts of her thoughts. Instead, her brain plays their conversation over and over, a loop that Alex doesn’t have it in her to break. Being an unstoppable force has its limits, and it bends and breaks against the immovable object of sixteen little words: “ _Just because you may believe I’m your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ” 

Nic knows that something is wrong, even if he doesn’t know what, and Alex can tell that he’s relieved that Amalia is there at her apartment with her. He offers nights out with beer and karaoke like they’d used to do in college and Alex tries, she really does. If throwing herself into things was the answer, it would have worked months ago. The closest thing that Alex finds to peace is when she’s in the quiet of the story and she can almost feel Strand there with her. So, another case with symbols and sacred geometry and a woman who’s begging for help. She schedules interviews and research and works at coffee shops until it’s too late to do it, as Alex attempts to minimize the time in her own office where the specter of Strand still haunts her from the chair on the other side of her desk. 

Frankly, Alex had never expected that the specter of Richard Strand would once more become a man. The panicked call from Nic where he doesn’t tell her what’s waiting for her leaves her feeling wrong footed, and Alex needs to ground herself amid the chaos so that she doesn’t just go running over to him and throw herself into his arms. He looks like hell and there’s no denying it, brimming with a manic sort of energy that she’d never seen from Strand before. For a moment, she thinks that he’s pleased to actually see her but what he really wants is Alex Reagan, hotshot reporter extraordinaire who’s moral code becomes flimsier by the second and her heart hurts for that, even as it feels good to be working side by side again. 

Even if Nic is there to act like a voice of reason and a chaperone. 

But god, Strand looks like shit. He looks like shit and he looks beautiful and Alex finds herself telling him that she’s taking him to lunch almost without meaning too. He tries to beg off and Alex refuses to take no for an answer. Honestly she’d been expecting him to throw some sort of fit but they’d walked in silence and far apart to the crowded coffee shop. Wide berths are given on both sides, wide enough that people around them take unbridge with it but neither of them ceeds an inch. Lunch is in silence, even as Alex has her recorder running just in case. The weight of Strand’s eyes on her has a physical mass, and Alex knows that he’s watching her when she’s not looking and Alex refuses to acknowledge it. If she acknowledges any piece of it, the entire plan is going to fall apart. When they’re walking back to the studio, Strand just says her name very softly. Shaking her head, the only thing that Alex can say is “don’t, Dr. Strand. Don’t. It’s not going to make any of this any easier.” Then before he can respond, Alex increases her walking speed so that he won’t attempt to speak to her again. 

She tells herself that the pained sigh behind her is nothing but her imagination.

The new evidence that Alex received about Howard is ever present inside of her head even as she sits down with the housekeeper, Maddie Franks. There’s something that bothers her about the woman, her gut rolling and heaving as she gives her interview. Honestly Alex can’t explain the reasoning why she’d suspected the housekeeper since she’d been mentioned, but no matter how innocuous her words were, Alex doesn’t trust her in the slightest. Later, she would wish that she could have talked to Strand about it like she used to, but in the fever of her and Nic’s fight and everything that had come after, Strand had vanished on her once again. Alex tells herself that it doesn’t bother her, that he knew what she found and he didn’t come to her but it does and she can’t believe that he doesn’t even call to make sure she’s alright after finding the body of a woman and her apartment covered in blood. 

Strand doesn’t call for updates even during the two weeks that Alex is effectively grounded. In her better thoughts, it’s because Nic or one of her producers told him not to contact her; in her worst thoughts it’s because of the fact that Strand is intentionally being cruel. Once upon a time Alex never would have thought that Richard Strand could be cruel—brisk and short yes but never outright cruel. Now however, Alex knows all too well just how cruel Strand could be when he felt like he needed to. Besides, it’s not like she can be at all useful in the search for his missing wife when she’s essentially on training wheels again. So Alex just does what she’s supposed to and records sleep notes and pretends like none of this bothers her as much as it does. 

Despite knowing that Nic doesn’t understand how much twisting the knife of Strand’s well-being in her chest, she can’t help but to be angry at him when he tells her that Ruby is worried about him sleeping in his office in Chicago. Hoping that calling him is enough so that she doesn’t need to violate the terms of their treaty, Alex is surprised when he says that he was (finally) about to call her. The surprise only doubles when he mentions that he’s coming to Seattle not to talk to her (or to see Alex or finally touch her) but Strand is coming to Seattle to meet with Amalia of all people. 

Jealousy is not a good emotion for Alex and she knows it. It’s ugly and sharp and acidic in her gut like the pulsing of an ulcer. Amalia had already been acting weird in the way that she kept vanishing and reappearing at odd hours and the feeling of something being off about her hasn’t gone away. Amalia is being weird and she can’t sleep and Strand is gone and everything is just so wrong it feels like it’s devouring Alex from the inside out. The timer for the Unsound countdown and the way that she’s very certain that Simon is stalking her only adds to the way that everything in her life is just wrong. Feeling like her emotions are on a hair trigger, Alex flounders and she doesn’t know what to do with anything anymore. Honestly she’s never felt more alone in her fucking life and it just seems to be getting worse. So jealous and angry and drowning Alex reaches out to the one person who is this is real she shouldn’t need to tell him anything. 

Knowing that it would drive Strand insane is only a bonus actually. 

But Tannis doesn’t help, not really and not in the way that she wanted him too. He tells her about another black tape and gives her some cryptic bullshit and Strand doesn’t even seem to be jealous as he focuses his attention on Amalia. Amalia who is currently fucking best friend and who has all but disappeared from her life. The jealousy is eating her alive as she watches the two of them through the soundproof glass in the studio. When Alex turns on the talkback mike, she doesn’t care that it’s wrong. She doesn’t care that she knows that Nic is going to murder her. What’s the point of trying to even attempt to play by the rules if no one else is going to? Even if Amalia and Strand weren’t flirting or touching, Alex knows that they’re not simply going to hand this information over to her. If they were going to do that then they wouldn't have gone into the studio in the first place. 

Fighting with Nic feels good. Alex isn’t someone who normally enjoys fighting, especially not as bitterly and sharply as her and Nic do it and she knows that it’s bad when he makes her turn the recorder off. When he looks at her, Alex is fairly certain that he suspects something else is going on but she just plays up her lack of sleep. It’s not even a lie; she’s so tired that every cell in her protests and screams out for sleep but she just can’t. They talk about holidays and taking time off but Alex can’t because she knows that if she doesn’t have work then she doesn’t have anything. Over the past two years, all her friendships have fallen by the wayside—Alex doesn’t blame them for it. She’s not been a good friend and she’s so obsessive and people have their own lives even when she’s not being irrational and sharp. Besides she’s keeping the biggest secret that she ever has and it’s eating her alive. Alex is unable to tell people about what happened or how her heart is breaking or why she’s so pissed that Strand’s base of operations is suddenly here in her backyard. It’s a violation of their agreement and she hates it; but she hates how glad that she is to have him here so close too. 

But proximity (or vastly more likely, proximity that they’re denying everything that their very souls want to the core of them) makes Alex’s lack of sleep and the issues that it brings with it all the worse. Nic is convinced that Alex is speaking the names of demons that she’d never heard before in her sleep. He’s worried about her. Honestly, Alex is worried about herself as well. Still, the last thing that she needs is Nic like making her seem all the more insane for believing in this stuff considering all the shit he pulled with Tanis and everything around it. Perhaps Strand had been right and opening herself up to believe in one thing: the fact that their soulmates had made it too easy for her to believe in everything else that was surrounding them. Well, her anyway. Strand has his own brand of bullshit. Maybe a holiday was the right idea after all--if nothing else it would mean that there would be more space between her and Strand. 

Is needing space but not wanting it the same as wanting it and not needing it? Alex doesn’t know, but when Strand is in the studio for the first time in what seems like months, she can feel the way her heart beats faster. They’re both trying--pulling on old roles that no longer suit them as they try to pretend like everything is fine in front of Nic. There are moments when Alex can feel the wear and tear on her, dragging her down and pretending to have their dynamic from season one while both of them are exhausted and falling apart is perhaps the most difficult thing Alex Reagan has ever done. She calls him ‘Dr. Strand’ and he pretends to act about her health and both of them make sure that Nic is seated between them in the studio when he plays the messages that could possibly be Coralee. She wants to entirely disbelieve the one that Strand says is his missing wife, but she can’t. Even if it’s entirely fucking stupid that Coralee read that dumb poem to him and that it was her favorite poem in the first place. Coralee Strand is and always will be a slow and steady drip of acid on Alex’s heart, the timer of it set so that the pain of the last drop wears off entirely before the next one comes again. 

That night Alex doesn’t even pretend to try and sleep. She just cleans her apartment while what Strand said repeats in her head: “ _Just because you may believe I’m your soulmate, Ms. Reagan doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ” 

Keith showing up again doesn’t surprise her, because there are just too many things that are tied together for him not too. When they fight over what Keith himself might believe, Nic goes more personal. He may not tell Alex she’s an idiot for believing in this and being afraid of it, but it comes close enough that her anger rises once again. Instead of being saved by the bell of Nic’s cellphone, the symbols and sigils and sacred geometry that was found below the blood at Maddie Frank’s apartment (the blood that isn’t even hers) has the opposite effect. Alex has always blamed herself for the woman’s death, and the images of it have haunted her ever since. She’d dreamed of finding her body, dreamed of the Hotchmans, dreamed of the blood and the flies and everything else… This is too much. It’s all been too much, and Alex loses it in Nic’s office. 

No. No. She doesn’t lose it—what Alex does is _break_. Finally after everything else she just breaks. She breaks in ways that she never has before, and Nic is panicked. He’s panicked as she panics and hyperventilates and cries and later Alex is just so fucking relieved that she couldn’t talk in that moment because she’s certain that if she could have, she would have told Nic everything for better or for worse. With her wrapped in a blanket and sitting on the couch in his office holding a mug of calming tea that she’s half swallowed down when it was too hot, he convinces her to take time off. Perhaps ‘convinces’ Alex to take time off is misstating it—he all but tells her that if she doesn’t take some time he’s going to go over her head and have Paul and Terry make her take the time off. Most of the fighting is out of Alex at that point, because she’s aware of what she’s holding so tightly as a secret and she knows that she needs to keep keeping it , especially with the way that the timer is still running. 

Three weeks, that’s what they agree on. Alex doesn’t tell Nic where she’s going and she definitely doesn’t tell Strand even that she’s leaving. Instead she goes into the woods and records sleep notes that have no mentions of how her chest aches or how Alex can’t help to become bitter over the fact that Strand doesn’t even bother to try and contact her. Driving the forty-five minutes into town is useless even as she talks to her mother and uploads her notes to keep Nic calm and content flowing. There’s no text messages or missed calls from Strand and as the clock winds itself down towards twelve hours left on it (and possibly her life, because Alex does believe that she’s going to die. There’s no way around it as each minute crawls 3:15 and she thinks of all the things that she wishes that she’d done.)

Yes, Richard Strand is at the top of that list. She hates that it is but that’s what is the truth. He’s her soulmate and one thing that Alex comes to realize as the time slips through her fingers is that what a soulmate is is actually the worst weapon that someone can have against you. Especially when it’s your soulmate who’s using it as such, especially when his aim is as lethal as Richard Strand’s is. 

“ _Just because you believe me to be your soulmate, Ms. Reagan, doesn’t mean that you are mine._ ” As the clock ticks over, Alex’s mind overlays it with the memory of Strand kissing her and she’s not even the tiniest bit surprised that what she believes her last thoughts on this planet are that. 

Then it’s over. She’s survived the year. For the first time in a while, Alex sleeps and what she records actually sounds like herself again. Really, she’s relieved as hell over it. Granted, once she’s back in Seattle the sleeplessness returns in force and she passes out on her bathroom floor to another dream of Maddie her first night back. 

Honestly Alex puts off going to Howard Strand’s house for as long as she can in hopes of Nic being able to come with her. Going alone seems stupid, even for someone who is as reckless as Alex Reagan is, but eventually she can’t put it off anymore. Starting her recorder as soon as she steps out of her car, Alex has her game face on. When Strand’s eyes light up upon seeing her, she’s very glad that she didn’t go into a visual medium. Still Alex focuses on small talk about the house and the traffic and the goddamn airport and everything but what’s really between them. Still, the sharpness of Strand’s words about the reason he’s come to Seattle (however much he delivers them in an even tone) cuts her to the quick and she hates that he’s in her city and her life because everything keeps coming back here to Coralee’s disappearance. So Alex is an asshole back, making an offer she knows that he won’t accept in a weaponized kindness. He fires back more purposely about Coralee and her stupid fucking _white chickens_ and goes to grab things as Alex herself goes looking for anything to keep her thoughts of off this. 

What she doesn’t expect to find is the Black Tapes on the floor, and she really doesn’t expect the Cheryl tape right there with all the rest. Later it will cross her mind that Strand had heard that Tannis had mentioned it and he’d left it there for her to find but she’s just so pleased to have some other piece that she doesn’t care about the reasoning for it. Alex ends up hooking up his computer because Strand is useless and seeing him so happy in the wedding pictures hurts in ways that seem almost purposeful given the lack of warning about them. Alex doesn’t rise into the bait, even as she tries to play the rational one that maybe it’s not Coralee reaching out to him. It makes no sense that his missing wife should call the studio when any asshole can get Strand’s phone number but he refuses to hear it. 

‘Tea and small talk’ is perhaps not the most painful time that the two of them have spent together, but it’s definitely far harder than Alex would want to admit that it is. She knows that he’s trying to draw it out so that he doesn’t need to show her the Cheryl tape, and Alex refuses to let the proximity to him get to her. A table can be an ocean if it needs to be, and Alex is well aware of that by now. She refuses to be manipulated into leaving it alone, and eventually even the small talk gets too much for Strand, and he shows her the video. 

As they watch the two children on the video, Strand’s tension is palpable and for the first time since they’d touched Alex knows that it doesn’t have anything to do with her. What Tannis said about going deeper not wider feels prophetic and all that Alex wants to do is to wrap her arms around him and hold him. Nothing sexual, nothing heated—she just wishes that she could give him a hug to make some of the pain in his spine slide away. But she knows that she can’t and that tiny voice begging Cheryl to not open the door crawls into Alex’s head and hurts her and when Strand looks at her, she can see how he draws his armor tighter around himself, forcing the sloped shoulders upwards and setting the line of his jaw tightly. 

The fact that the men are tall takes Alex’s breath away. It’s all too familiar and she hates it. So if Strand can’t be Strand like then Alex will do her best pale imitation of him. So she questions and asks and pushes and then when he says that he saw something, Alex is just stunned. This was his first black tape and Alex knows the thing that is unsolved is Strand himself. It’s weird and her head spins more than a little bit as she keeps hearing his soft voice asking Cheryl not to do it. God, it shouldn’t make her want to cry and Alex knows down to her very bones that the voice that she hears in the darkest part of the night is going to have this additional chorus too. 

There’s a small part of Alex that is angry with Tannis Braun because she can’t help but to feel used as a bomb in whatever war he and Strand have been engaging in for the last twenty years. But then again everything makes her feel wrong footed and smothered. So Alex goes forward and does what she does best: she dives into work and takes the new files from Keith Dabbic to Michael Pullman. If the universe was better than it would have been him rather than Strand who was her soulmate. It would be a more normal life but she can’t do anything about it. Instead she lets him gently tease her about calling her friend ‘Dr. Strand’ and she lets out a little laugh that feels more real than anything that she’s done in a long time and a lifetime of possibilities pass over her mind. It’s not something that lasts very long because suddenly Glushka thrusts itself back into the limelight. 

She wants to go. Alex wants to be the one to leave Seattle and to run in the same way that Strand has been doing for months and she’s just so tired of loving him and having it hurt. Even if Nic mocks her, Alex knows that this is dangerous and she’s just done. Nicodemus Silver can be such a fucking asshole and sometimes she wonders if he’s the best friend he claims to be. One moment he’s making what she says sound reasonable and then the next time she sees him it’s like he’s had a personality transplant. It makes her feel even more unstable when she doesn’t know which version of Nicodemus she’s going to run into the office. 

Alex isn’t an idiot; she knows the difference in time is happening when he goes home and spends the night with Amalia. For all his talk of Alex being the one who whispers the name in her recording she thinks that it’s even less true now. Wherever Amalia is saying to Nic, Alex doesn’t think that the woman is her friend. Not anymore. Maybe that was the difference in Amalia since she’d come back—that while Alex had been thinking that they were friends was what had been off all along. Trying to push the thoughts aside is difficult but it’s one more thing that Alex is trying her best to bury. 

Deep down, some nights like after the night with Nic she wonders if at least part of her is actually trying to bury her career. 

Cheryl demands that Alex call her, that she includes her and Alex can see the way that Richard and Cheryl were twins. It’s there in their tallness, in the sharpness of their blue eyes and the stately way that Cheryl had aged with the graying steaks in her hair giving her a stately appearance. But when she talks about the night and the Tall Men in their house, Alex can see something else that reminds her of Strand—the exhausted haunted look of memories that refused to be washed away no matter how much they both attempted to try. 

It takes real work for Alex to hide the shaking in her voice. She can feel it cold and spreading through her middle, and it’s in the hand that she keeps wraps around her pen. Alex knows that smell. She knows how it sounds when it’s excited and the sounds that the bone of their fingers make when they click together. As she interviews Cheryl, Alex feels like she’s only half present and the other half of her is lost among nightmares that she’s tried so hard to forget. “He thought they were after you?” Alex is proud of how her voice doesn’t waver when she asks the question, and she can hear the echo of his words in her head ‘ _I’m worried about Charlie. I’m worried about you_.’ 

Cheryl confirming the violence in the Strand household just tightens up the knots in her stomach and her palms are slick over her pen. The stuff Cheryl said about a boy and a River is just mixed into the soup of everything else and Alex knows that while she can’t tell anyone about the soulmate stuff, the thing about the Strand family being hunted is relevant even if Strand himself isn’t going to want her to do it. 

It’s a day before Alex can work herself up to going to Howard’s house because she needs to be calmer and less on edge. The entire drive to Strand’s Victorian is hard and Alex just practices slipping on the facade of who she was when this all began. Then it hadn’t been one but now she can’t help but to think of it that way and it makes her swallow. God, there really isn’t anyway she’s getting out of this unchanged is there? There hadn’t been since the first time she had heard Richard Strand’s voice when they were doing research on him. Now, the reasoning for it was clear: it had been the part of her soul that was tied with his own. At least this time the small talk is a little bit better anyway, even if they both seem like they’re being exceptionally careful with one another. Perhaps Strand knows how close Alex is breaking. Perhaps he just misses that too, but it’s a moment more painful than she’d ever want to admit. But it’s not something that they can keep up for very long at all and Alex knows that Strand knows she came with a purpose. 

Somehow the fact that the fight isn’t as bitter as Alex expects hurts more. They both know that her “you lied to me” has the undercurrent of the unspoken ‘ _again_ ’ at the end of it and Alex doesn’t even have the chance to explain that she’s not talking about the thing between them. But he refuses to engage for the first time, and instead asks Alex to go and somehow that slices her as evenly as the sharpness of the fight that she’d prepared for that he doesn’t give her. 

Furious and angry and shaking, Nic gives her the fight that Alex needs and it’s one of their worst. It’s bitter and sharp and angry and he threatens her once again in his very Nic way and Alex almost tells him about Amalia but that gets buried too. Later, she does mean what she says about being glad that Nic makes her delete the recording and telling their audience about what happened rather than the recording of their discussion. Wanting to get her head on straight seems like an impossible task but Alex wants to try and turn at least one thing around so that she has control over something that’s rapidly spinning out of all control and she knows it. But fixing her relationship with Strand has a lot more to do with things than just what she told about his family. 

Going to Victoria is as much of a penance as Alex can think of in addition to everything else. Yes, there’s a good chance that Strand wouldn’t share whatever he finds there, but there’s also the concern about him needing to face the ghosts that are in the hallways of that hotel as much as everything else. So she goes and she waits outside for him to show up, not quite understanding how she managed to beat him there so badly when they were on the same ferry. He looks livid to see her standing there, and Alex needs to swallow over her pain with that. But then there’s resignation in him as they fall into step close to one another but far enough that their touching isn’t going to be something that happens on accident. 

But as they draw nearer to that honeymoon suite, Strand gets closer to her. It’s subtle at first, the way that the distance between them becomes shorter and shorter. Alex knows him well enough to know that he’s hurting—Alex can see it in him with the way that his edges sharpen themselves against each other. By the time they’re standing in the doorway to the honeymoon suite, Alex can feel his hand hovering low at her back. He doesn’t touch her not quite but she can still feel the warmth of Strand’s palm in the air above her jacket. Immediately Alex’s head snaps back to look at him and what she sees hurts. Strand looks pained, as she’d expected him to look honestly but the resignation is something else. Her heart twists and Alex very firmly steps away from him. God the one time he even considers touching her and it doesn’t even have anything to do with Alex herself. No, instead it’s about Coralee and his pain and Alex is so angry that she can’t breathe for a moment. 

God, not even their soulmates can be about anything but Richard Strand’s fucking pain and his fucking bitch wife. 

Alex refuses to cry, she refuses to cry one more goddamn tear over him when she’s already shed so many and instead she takes a page out of Strand’s book. Alex Reagan is a fucking asshole to him. She’s not kind or soft or sympathetic and Strand is astonished when she says the things that he would say to someone else to his face. She’s an asshole about it being his honeymoon. She’s an asshole and asks if anything special about it happened other than honeymoon stuff. The painting on the wall is gross, and Alex normally would have flinched away from it but if the fantastic Coralee Strand made her husband lock one like it in an armoire then Alex Reagan was going to meet the damned thing head on. 

There is real fear and surprise when someone knocks on the door, and the alarm of both of them mirrors back at the other. He’s not expecting someone and the mechanized warning rings in Alex’s head and she knows that Strand is remembering it too. Thankfully he’s more level headed and asks her to snap the photo on her phone and she takes three including one of the front before she tucks her phone tightly into her bra while Strand argues with the ‘confused’ French Candians and in the elevator neither of them speak on their way to the front desk. 

Strand is livid of course and as much as he argues about the fact that he booked the room first, they don’t give in considering the couple in question also has a reservation and they are in fact on their honeymoon. When Strand can’t even lie and say that the two of them are, the hotel instead offers to put them up for free. “Separate rooms.” Alex says immediately. “We want separate rooms.”

“Alex!” Strand immediately protests and Alex meets his gaze head on. 

“My _colleague_ and I require separate rooms, isn’t that right, _Dr. Strand_?” The icy tone in Alex’s voice works for both Strand and the clerk and while she doesn’t say anything, Alex is pretty sure the rooms are on different floors because the clerk can tell just how much Alex wants to be as far from Strand as possible. Alex snaps up her key first and immediately heads for the lift before Strand even has his own in hand. If there wasn’t someone else in the elevator to hold it for him, Alex wouldn’t have. 

After the man gets off at the next floor, Strand stops the elevator. His voice is livid; furious and cold. “What the hell are you playing at, Alex? This isn’t like you!”

He goes cold and Alex goes hot, her tone matching the anger in his own. “What am I playing at? What the hell are you doing, Strand?! You think that I’m just some rebound to turn to because you’re sad? You think that you get to touch me because your heart is breaking over your wife? You don’t. You’re the one who wanted it this way, Richard. Not me. This is all your plan and your wish and your fucking idea. We’re not soulmates, remember? _I may believe you to be mine, but I’m not yours_. You don’t get to take that back because you’re lonely and hurting. Because you just want to not feel the pain you are right now because Coralee left again and couldn’t even be bothered to call you directly and instead had to filter everything through me. You made your choice six months ago when you left. You made it again in your office. I’ve been living with it for all this time. You live with it now.”

She slams the button to restart the elevator again and then gets out as soon as the doors open. “Alex…” he says her name and there’s so much sadness in it and for a moment she thinks he’s going to grab her anyway but she just shakes her head and walks away. Thankfully her room is only a few doors from the elevator and Alex leans against the inside door as soon as she waits inside. Holding her breath for as long as she’s able, Alex waits for a knock of the door that doesn’t come. 

The tears that Alex refused to let fall release and she throws herself onto the hotel bed and she sobs until she can’t sob anymore. This time when her nightmares come, over and over they just show Alex what Richard’s face looked like when he called her name. 

Despite how they don’t talk again before they leave the hotel, they find themselves both getting coffee and bagels at the same time. To Strand it’s like the conversation that they’d had in the elevator might not have ever happened for how he is just his normal professional self. Alex manages to match that energy but only just while they talk about the painting and the case and neither one of them mention Coralee by name. It could almost be old times, but a fractured version of them and Alex knows that it’s her fault. But she also knows how she can’t go back to not having said what she did. She can’t put the genie back in the bottle of what she did and this is the way that it had to be. 

If only it didn’t hurt so damned badly. 

With their cars both broken into on either side of the ferry, Strand doesn’t need to say that they were targeted—Alex knows. And she knows that they know because of the show. For the first time Alex properly understands what Strand means when she says that she’s in danger. He tries to reassure her, but it doesn’t work, not really. They go their separate ways, Alex to work and Strand back to whatever the hell he’s doing and Alex’s sense of unease only grows when Nic doesn’t even fucking warn her that Simon’s on the phone for her. 

Alex is already frazzled even before Simon starts with his cryptic bullshit. Out of all the things that Alex has uncovered Simon Reese is the one that disquietes her the most on the longest nights. She needs to stop herself from actually asking him questions on the nights when she feels the least alone in her apartment—Alex doesn’t know what would be worse for Simon to actually answer them or for him not to. But after the last few days, Alex is exhausted and her patience is razor thin and the last thing she has the ability to handle is for Simon to jerk her around when she feels so emotionally frail. Maybe it’s because Alex finally lets her impatience show to him, or maybe it’s because Simon feels it’s actually time but his cryptic bullshit actually makes more sense to her now, especially when he talks about the things that she’s keeping secret. Not just Strand’s secret (and her and Strand’s secret that he doesn’t mention) but also the concerns that she’s privately been having about Amalia since she’d returned to Seattle. The feeling of being right only intensified when Amalia tried to gaslight her over how she’d been behaving and the damned Unsound being sent from her email address. Later, when Alex went back to check she couldn't help but to notice that it was sent on the same night that someone had been whispering Azazel on her sleep note. After over a decade of friendship with Nicodemus Silver, Alex knows how deeply he sleeps especially when he’s high on a Friday night. It would have been very easy for Amalia to have left and used the keys Alex had given her to record both the sleep note and send the email. As much as she hates thinking about it, she just doesn’t trust Amalia anymore and it hurts. 

Privately she wonders if the way that someone found out about the exact date and time the two of them listened to the Unsound for the first time was that Nic had told Amalia about it. 

But life continues with that odd sort of careful truce between herself and Strand. They go over the book cipher (and Alex isn’t at all surprised that Coralee’s pretentious as hell tastes means that it also expands to _Nine Stories_. Nic having copies is something she’s teased him about before and Alex isn’t surprised to see that the copy in question is one that Coralee had inscribed a message in, even if she doesn’t read it. Yes of course Alex is curious about what it says, but she’s trying to lessen her amount of hurt—not dig into it.) and Alex watches him lie to her about what Cheryl was talking about. He knows exactly what boy and what River his sister told her about and it makes her all the more determined to figure out what Cheryl is trying to tell her. It’s weird that demons have become commonplace—the norm now really and Alex only half focuses on them now even with what they’d discovered from Jessica Wheldon and “John”. God, she’s not even surprised by the upside down face reappearing. 

Strand doesn’t want to tell her about the boy by the River so Alex calls Cheryl again, and the portrait that she paints of Strand’s home life is bleak. It swims among the new knowledge about Amalia and how she’d been lying about what story she was working on. Even when the two of them go to Vancouver to try and talk to Thomas Warren and run into the box and everything in it, Alex still can’t help but to think about Cheryl’s voice when she had so ominously warned her about Strand’s “drifting” and how Alex herself will “find out.”

It’s only when they’re back in Seattle and going over things that are in the box of one E. Hausdorff that Alex realizes just how much his case ties into Simon’s. There’s too much for that to be just coincidence, and it’s scary how both she and Nic seem to be on the same page with someone intentionally spreading this to kids. It doesn’t help that Simon escapes almost immediately after they find out about them. To her, it almost seems like that it was some sort of signal to Simon. Or something else was, that was possible too. But Simon Reese could have escaped whenever and it seems really odd that the box and it’s meaning about watchers and the pilori coming out happening just before. 

And of course there’s Strand’s friend. A friend who is a woman who he’s working with. Alex tells herself she’s not jealous and that the reason that it bothers her so much is because it’s happening just after Nic’s sketchy friend spent several hours hitting on her in ways that became too obnoxious to cut into the show. But lying to herself has never been something that Alex has been particularly good with. Whoever this “she” is, Alex hates her and she’s not normally someone who hates on a personal level. Telling herself that it doesn’t matter that all of the hate for those she hates comes from people in Strand’s life—Coralee, his father, Thomas Warren, she—Alex takes her anger into trying to figure out the boy in the River. If Strand won’t tell her about him, then Alex will do it her own damn self. 

Granted, the intern helped, but Alex doesn’t mention her investigation to Strand, not even when he brings up the mark on the machine and Coralee’s ring. It doesn’t get any easier, hearing him talk about his wife, but Alex thinks that she’s getting better at dealing with it at least. It’s a small favor, but one she’s glad of. If the two of them can manage to cut each other with paper cuts then they might at least manage to get out of here alive. But there is something that’s prickling at the back of her mind about how the ring that Coralee refused to take off bearing the mark of Tiamat. She wants to press on it, to ask him questions on his life, but there’s only so many times that Alex can pack her wounds with salt and keep going, so she’s relieved when her phone rings. “I should go, Amalia’s supposed to call me in half an hour. I don’t want to miss her call, it’s hard for us to line up our schedules right now.” 

“Your schedules?” Strand sounds relieved, and Alex frowns a bit. “Does that mean she’s back in Russia?” 

“Yes. She wanted to go home and get things straightened out with the government. So…” 

“Good. That’s good.” Alex just assumes that he’s relieved that Amalia can figure out whatever was related to the auction that they’d talked about when she’d recorded their conversation. “I’ll see you tomorrow then?”

“Yeah.” Alex just says quickly, trying to not be short as she tugs her coat on. “I’ll let you know if she’s got any new information.” 

But Alex couldn’t possibly know that the new information that Amalia would uncover was that Keith Dabbic is dead, and has been for possibly a while. Guilt slammed itself into her gut, and it doesn’t help when she gets another phone call from the Los Gatos police station, only this time, it’s nothing that they can blame her for. As soon as Alex explains, Nic is the one to call Strand to come into the studio to watch the video that Captain Stanner had sent along. It’s bad, Alex knows that it’s bad even before they hit play on the secure video. She doesn’t scream, but she does gasp and the swinging figure of Edward Lewis merges with the hanging figure of Maddie Franks in Alex’s head and she can’t watch. Vomit is sharp and acidic as it burns at the back of her throat, and she swallows it down as much as she can as they rewind the video to see the shadow that’s there in the cell with him. Half a second, the person did it in half a second and Alex already has a sinking feeling that she knows how it happened even before the intern bursts into the room.

Monks and robes and all in a circle. And of course the familiar sign from Simon’s cell there at the back of the tents of the men who had died. Strand calls it both ‘interesting’ and ‘concerning’ even when Alex is trembling and calling Captain Stanner back because she has a hunch that she knows is right. More symbols, more equations and more sacred geometry. It’s Simon, and Alex knows that it is even when both Nic and Strand make her sound insane. Maybe in a normal situation they would be right, but everything surrounding The Black Tapes hasn’t ever been normal, and Alex knows that Strand knows that too. She doesn’t fight with him about it, because there’s no point. It’s Simon, and Alex knows that he’s going to reach out and contact her. At least this time he has the good sense not to simply just show up in her apartment in the middle of the night, and he asks her to call him rather than just dropping it on her unexpectedly. 

Alex calls, reflexively turning on her recorder when she does so. “ ** _Well, we’re not strangers, are we Alex?_** ” Somehow she feels like that has more meaning than Simon’s tone would imply it does, as does “ ** _No. I don't want to lead you astray, Alex. You need to focus right now._** ” It feels like an admonition about what she’s looking into with Bobby Maimes, especially when he tells her to focus on the machine. Maybe it’s for the best that Simon hangs up before Alex can argue about that with him. Because she’s not going to stop looking into it, even as she does start to add some additional focus on the Machine. 

Whatever hestiance Strand may have had before with involving Ruby in everything, it doesn’t seem to be standing anymore, from how she’s the one who finds the engraving of the sign of Tiamat on the photos of the machine that Warren was more and more likely to be behind. He goes off on one of his mysterious solo trips (probably solo trips anyway) and Alex finally is able to visit Howard’s house alone. She’s not at all certain what it is that she’s looking for in the remnants of Strand’s father’s things, but she does know that there’s something here that she’s supposed to find. It costs her a fair amount of blood and a nasty cut to find the letters between Howard Strand and someone in Istanbul, but what they could possibly mean makes her feel sick. Sitting there on the floor in the hallway, Alex watches as her finger drips blood on the edge of the letters after it saturated the tissue that she’d wrapped tightly around it, and she tries very hard not to think that it’s prophetic or something like that. 

Despite how many ties there are wrapping all around them: Mount Arat, The Sagamore, The Mysterium, Percival Black, Simon Reese, Howard Strand… it was too much of a coincidence that all of them were coming back now, and Alex knows it. When Strand tries to tell her that she’s reaching, Alex almost shatters the peace between them. Instead, she gets in touch with Wesley Coates and asks him about how he finds Bobby Maimes’ body, and he tells her that it wasn’t him--it was Richard Strand. 

Despite feeling cold all over, and wondering if she had ever really known anything about him at all, Alex calls Wesley’s brother Wayne, and he describes a boy who doesn’t seem possible could have grown up to be Dr. Richard Strand of The Strand Institute. Richie Strand--he sounds like someone who she would have liked, someone who she would have been proud to call her friend. Someone who she would have been proud to have as her soulmate. In many ways, the boy that Wayne describes reminds her of how Alex likes to think of herself when she’s at her best: honest and kind and loyal and someone who everyone liked. What doesn’t escape her notice is how far Alex has fallen from those self ideals over the last two years, and how much of her plummet has come because of this being bound soul to soul with Richard Strand himself. 

With her head spinning, Alex meets with Nic as she explains what she’d found out, and she doesn’t argue with him about how he thinks that she should handle it. Another Hauster file just tops off the day, along with the link to another national forest. If there’s one thing Alex isn’t going to do is take the bait and go out into the woods with everything else going on. 

Taking all of this to Strand, Alex doesn’t know how to tell him that she knows, not really. So instead she brings up the Axis Mundi and Mount Arat and Percival Black. But he doesn’t let her go on with it, and from the way that his eyes peer into her Alex is well aware of the fact that he knows that something has changed in her, and in the things between them. Sharpness and anger and fighting between them is expected of course, but when it ends with Strand asking him to live, when it ends with his quiet and despondent “ ** _please just leave me alone._** ” Alex feels as if she’s actually committed a murder or something. It hurts, and she goes home and cries. She gets so drunk that she is sick and almost too hungover to go to work the next day. Her life keeps feeling more and more like a horror movie and Alex feels like she’s drowning in the knowledge that someone really was trying to get her to Gluska by sending a picture with Keith Dabbic’s face sewn onto their own. She wants to kill Nic for making her go with him to Strand’s father’s house but at least he’d be there this time to stop her from doing anything stupid. More archaeology, more bullshit with Tiamat and Coralee and god she’s never been more tired in her entire life. 

But there’s finally the interview with Warren, and Alex promises herself that she’s going to go on vacation as soon as she gets back from that interview with Strand and Warren. Someplace warm this time, with lots of sandy beaches and fruity drinks. Before she can do that, however, Alex needs to apologize to Strand. Really apologize. Even if he doesn’t want to apologize to her, even if he doesn’t think that he has anything to apologize for, Alex can’t keep fighting with him like this. It’s not who she wants to be anymore, this isn’t how she wants to approach her life, and she wishes that she could just go back and undo their touching in the first place. Wanting to just be better isn’t enough and Alex knows it, so she needs to make the first step. Alex takes a step towards things being better, and then Strand does as well, but whatever domestic sort of truce the two of them have embarked on doesn’t last very long as the security forces start to move to intercept them. 

Alex is so freaked out that she doesn’t know who the woman who pulled up in a peel of screaming tires and slammed doors told them to get into the van. She wasn’t planning on it, not even when she tells her to get into the van if she wants to live. It’s only when Strand says to get into the van that she does. “ ** _What’s going on?_** ” She asks, frightened and confused. 

“ ** _Alex, I’d like you to meet Coralee._** ”


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After their rescue (or kidnapping) by Coralee, we see what happened while Coralee and Richard were in that bedroom, and then Strand crawls on his belly and has his Darcy moment.

Alex looks confused and hurt, and it’s like a knife in his guts when she tries to talk to his wife. Her voice is calm, and it’s polite even which is far more than Strand thinks that he would have been able to pull off if their positions were reversed. Hell, he’s not even sure if he could pull off polite now considering the way that the pain flashed through Alex’s eyes. But she’s trying. “Are you going to tell us what’s going on now? Where have you been for all these years? What happened?”

“I’m sorry, Alex,” Richard knows his wife’s icily polite tones all too well and he needs to bite down on telling Coralee to stop talking to her like that. “They’ll be time for you to interview me later. I’m afraid that I need to talk to my husband first.” While Alex may not have caught that ‘later’ could offer a wide coverage of things, Strand does, but then again he’s had the experience of thirteen years of marriage to her and Alex doesn’t. They don’t go very far all things considered, but he’s not surprised when they pull into an Airbnb.

As soon as the two of them are in the bedroom together, Strand just looks at her and says flatly, “you should have warned me it was dangerous.” 

Coralee just sits on the edge of the bed, looking loose as if this was their bedroom back in Chicago and not in some random person’s house after them nearly being taken by people with guns. “We both know, my love that you wouldn’t have listened, and that Alex definitely would not have.” 

“Leave her out of this.” Strand snarls the words at his wife, and she just raises her brow in response to him. “This isn’t about Alex Reagan. This is about us, and it’s about figuring out what the hell Warren is doing.” 

“You know, I think you and I have very different ideas about how the term ‘isn’t’ is defined, Richard.” He just scoffs at her even before Coralee continues, “besides, telling you not to do something is the surest way to get you to do it. Something you and Ms. Reagan have in common from everything that I’ve seen of her.” 

“You need to stop talking about Alex, Coralee. Right this very second. You don’t even get to say her name. She’s a good person and she doesn’t deserve getting dragged into all of this with us. It’s the biggest regret of my life, even bigger than the one where I married you.” It’s not shouted, it’s not even all that angry; instead it’s quiet and resigned. 

“Richard,” she says softly, and she reaches over for his hand, despite the way that Strand attempts to jerk his own away from Coralee. “I know that you don’t understand this now, but I didn’t have a choice. Warren was… I believed in him. I believed in his cause. I believed that you needed to be turned to our side in order to save everything. I thought that I could keep you safe from anyone that wanted to hurt you. If I could make you love me, then you’d be protected, both you and Charlie. What Howard did, how he forced you to shut down your gifts--it crippled you. It’s still crippling you. You refuse to believe in even yourself so badly that…” 

“Spare me.” Strand snarls the words, and it feels all too familiar like the ways that they used to fight so that Charlie didn’t find out about it. “Don’t get sanctimonious with me, Coralee. We both know that you were the one to stop me from finding you when you disappeared. And because I couldn’t find you, it cost me _everything_. It cost me my daughter and my sister. It cost me friends and colleagues and my job. It made people think that I was some sort of cold blooded murderer who had chopped you up into little pieces and dropped you into the sea.” 

Coralee just viciously shakes her head. “It didn’t cost you ‘everything’ you’re being melodramatic. ‘Everything’ would have been Charlie’s life. It would have been your life. It would have been Cheryl’s life. And it would have been mine too.” 

“So you ran to save your own neck. I’m not a fool, I know that Warren would have killed you when you didn’t somehow manage to end up pregnant. When he couldn’t get his hands on me or Charlie, he wanted someone that he could have prevented my father’s influence on. Someone who was raised to believe in all of Tiamat’s bullshit. It’s too bad that the first thing that I did when I was free of everything after you left was get a vasectomy. I couldn’t make sure that anyone else took a page out of your book fast enough!” From the silence to that, Strand is well aware of the fact that his wife knew about that too. “Tell me, my beloved wife,” he says it angrily, mockingly, “did you plan to become someone else and try again. How many different people did you try to be when were together? Two? Three? All those times something was just a little bit off, just a little bit different from what you said before. Did you think that I wouldn’t have noticed those?! You and Warren are cut from the same cloth, Coralee. You both think me a foolish man who’s so blinded by love for you I would do anything.”

“But you do love me, Richard. I know you do. Even now you do.” Coralee moved to touch his face and he pulls back angrily. 

“I’m not here because I love you, Coralee. I’m here because I want the truth. You _owe me that._ ”

“Fine. You want the truth? Then I’ll give it to you. But it’s not going to fix or change anything! All it’s going to do is hurt you more!”

“You’ve been hurting me for thirty-three years. Why should now be any different?” As much as Richard wants too, he can’t keep the sadness from his voice. The truth is there etched into each breath that he uses to form the words. 

“Yes. Warren sent me to you. He wanted me to turn you to our side. If not you then he wanted me to turn Charlie. I couldn’t do it to her, she was an innocent. You were an adult. If you made the choice then it was yours and you would have understood everything that it meant. I was your watcher, Richard. I was supposed to keep tabs on you and keep you safe. The Advocate was the one who was in charge, but Thomas Warren was the one who gave me the orders. He was my contact—my handler.”

“And your lover. Let’s not forget that.”

“Yes, he was my lover. I thought that if I seduced him then he would leave me alone to do my work.” Richard just scoffs painfully, and Coralee goes on. “I was trying to protect you from both sides then. I didn’t start off loving you, Richard. I didn’t mean to fall in love with you. It would have been far easier for me if I hadn’t. But I did. I loved you and Charlie. You were my family, my rock. And I wanted you to love me as much as you thought you did in the beginning.” 

“I was a lonely, desperate sleep deprived man in the beginning. I would have fallen for anyone who was halfway pretty with a pulse who smiled at me.” 

Coralee looks sad, and worse she looks ashamed. “That isn’t true, Richard. I wish it was that simple but it wasn’t.” 

It’s with a sinking feeling in his stomach that Richard asks: “what do you mean?” 

“Warren’s been… Davea Corporation has spent years and hundreds of millions of dollars studying the scientific basis of the touch-based soulmate phenomena. Even they’ve not been able to understand it, not fully. But what they can do, and what they have been able to do for four decades is to come up with a touch-based potion that mimicked some version of the effects.” Richard just went pale, and Coralee moved closer to him. “I’m sorry. I’m sorry, I didn’t know you when I started, and once I started to love you, I was convinced that you would have really loved me by then. So I stopped using it, I stopped and got rid of it.” 

“What?” 

“It couldn’t make you do anything you truly didn’t want to do, Richard. It couldn’t make you want me if there wasn’t some part of you that wasn’t already attracted to me. It isn’t a date rape drug or something, I swear to you I wouldn’t have done that. It was like… pheromones, and it made you feel more pleasant to be around me.” 

“How the hell do you think that I would trust you in that?” 

“Because the Strand family gifts can’t be passed down between people who aren’t in love. It’s as simple as that. It’s why Charlie doesn’t have them. Whatever it is in your familial line, it can only be unlocked by love. Real love on both sides. I could make you like me more, but I couldn’t make you love me, I couldn’t make you have sex with me. And Warren didn’t even mention a child to me until it became very clear that I was in love with you as well.” 

“Well,” he says, and just clears his throat sharply. “I should have known that you would have been so very practical, Coralee.” 

“Richard you need to leave all of this alone. Stay away from Warren and Daeva Corp. Just let this all go.” 

“You don’t get to make my decisions for me. Not anymore. You never should have been able to do so in the first place.” 

“I love you, Richard. Just come away with me. Just leave all of this behind and let it go. Let it be laid to rest. You don’t need any more answers. When have answers ever made anything better.” When Strand doesn’t say anything and moves towards the door to start to open it, Coralee just adds desperately, “what do you think Warren is going to do when he realizes that Alex Reagan is your soulmate? When he finds out that there’s nothing that you wouldn’t do to make sure she’s safe?” 

“I told you not to say her name.” He hisses at her, his eyes bright and cold. “Do you think so little of me that I would go on the run with you while leaving her here and alone to deal with all of this?” 

“You would if you thought it would keep her safe. She deserves to be safe, Richard. I think that’s one thing we can agree on.” 

“Alex _does_ deserve to be safe, but Alex Reagan would never _choose_ to be safe. All of this time you’ve been watching her, using her to do your dirty work when I wouldn’t have any other option but to follow up on the leads that you sent me on, and now you dare to try and use her name to get what you want. Do you know what the difference between her and you is? It’s that if the situations were reversed, Alex would actually mean this. She would want me to go with the person I love, but she would want me to make my own choice. Unlike you, Coralee, Alex doesn’t try to take my choices away from me. When I refused to touch her at all in the beginning of our professional relationship, she accepted it. She didn’t try and connive ways for me to touch her. She didn’t attempt to pretend to be my soulmate, and when we did touch, it was by accident and yes, she came to see me but it was because she was worried about me. I tried to shatter her heart over and over, and yet she still helped me. I made her cry, I practically destroyed her and yet she still trusted me enough to get into that van with you. I love her, but I don’t deserve her, and I’m not going to disparage who she is by running away from her again.” 

“Richard,” Coralee just sighs his name. “With everything that you’ve done, do you really hope that she’s going to take you back.” 

“I don’t deserve to have her take me back.” It’s quiet, but it’s entirely matter-of-fact. “Was there anything else?” 

Coralee is silent for a few moments, and then she just shakes her head. “Goodbye, Richard.”

Richard just turns away from her and the door before he softly says, “goodbye, Coralee.” 

If he was a better person, maybe he would have left with Coralee. If he was more noble, more selfless he would have gotten into the van with his wife in order to protect the woman that he loves, the woman is his soulmate. But Richard Strand isn’t noble, and he’s not a good man. Still, he follows her and Alex onto the porch. He should go, and he knows it, but there’s Richie’s soft voice in his head, and it sounds sad when he just says: _If you go now, you can never go back. Alex will never take you back. She may not now, but if you leave her all alone with this then she’ll never forgive you for it_. Richard’s internal answer is quiet as he turns and walks back into the house and into the kitchen. ‘She shouldn’t forgive me for it now.’ 

He goes inside and is relieved (but not at all surprised, really) to see that Alex (and it had to have been Alex, there was no one else that it could have been) had put the kettle on for a cup of tea. In a mug, there was one of the fancy tea bags that she’d started carrying in her bag for him after the third or fifth time that they’d been in a coffee shop and he’d complained that the tea variety was terrible. Despite how he feels like he might tear up at any second (and how humiliating would that be, and how misconstrued!) Richard chuckles before he adds the hot water. When Alex comes back in, there are things that he knows that he needs to tell her, and there are going to be questions that she has every right to ask, but for now, they both stand in silence, Alex with her own cup of tea in her hand. 

She never would drink instant. 

“ ** _Thank you._** ” It’s difficult for him to say it, even though it’s just the bare minimum of what Richard knows that he needs to say to her. 

Alex looks confused when she asks, “ ** _For what?_** ” The pause between the words that come next is met with Richard just looking deep into her eyes. “ ** _No, it's... Yeah. It's okay._** ” 

It’s not okay. There is no part about this situation that is anything approaching okay, but right now he needs to be careful. More careful than Richard Strand has ever been with anything in his entire life. He doesn’t know any sort of magical words from all of the languages that he can speak that would somehow make this alright, or that would make Alex Reagan forgive him. So, he purchases himself some time and space to think with: “ ** _I haven’t fully processed it all. Not yet_**.” 

And immediately Alex is understanding with an empathy that Richard couldn’t hope to match in a thousand lifetimes. “ ** _Of course. Maybe you’ll see her again. One day. Maybe?_** ” 

He never wants to see his wife again. “ ** _I don’t think so. At least…_** ” he starts to say that he hopes not, but he doesn’t want to make Alex feel bad, and he doesn’t want what he still needs to do to be something that Alex thinks is based on anger or hurt. “ ** _I’m not going to pin any hopes on that._** ” 

Alex’s voice is soft and reassuring, even though he can tell that the words come at a cost to her. “ ** _Well, if it’s any consolation, I could tell she still loves you._** ”

He doesn’t deserve her. He never did. “ ** _It’s not. But thank you._** ” Alex looks like she wants to say something else, but the sound of his text message goes off, and Richard pulls out his phone. “They’ve brought my car. Apparently there was another one of Coralee’s...team. It should be in front of the house now.” 

“Oh. Right.” Alex pauses. “Is there anything else you need here?” No, there’s nothing that he needs here, because there’s no such thing as a time machine. 

Strand just shakes his head before he leads her out and opens the car door for her before he gets in and starts it up. He doesn’t punch the coordinates into the gps or anything like that, instead he just picks a direction and starts driving, letting something that he’s spent twenty years denying guide him when to turn and where to go. They’d been driving in silence for ten minutes when Richard speaks. “There’s things I need to tell you, Alex. But it can’t be on the record. Or…” he clears his throat as he tries again. “At least they shouldn’t be on the record, but that’s a decision that you should make. This is your story, but it’s your life too. I don’t want to take your decisions away on that again.”

Alex looks confused for a moment, and she just says “okay” before there’s a soft click of her turning the recorder off. 

“You should know that I’m not telling you this in some misguided effort to have you forgive me. I don’t deserve to have your forgiveness for what I’ve put you through over the past two years. But there are some...explanations that I owe you—that you deserve—nevertheless. Later, when we get back to my father’s house, I’ll go back on the record and we can talk about all of it: what Coralee said, where she’s been, Bobby Maimes, why I started the Institute—all of it. But this isn’t about that. Not directly. This is about us.”

“What about us?”

Richard sighs, and he wishes he could stop driving but it doesn’t feel safe enough for him to do that yet, so instead he just glances at her. Alex is turned towards him in the passenger seat, and she looks gorgeous and luminous just as she did the first day that she had walked into his office. “You were right. We are soulmates. We always have been. I ran away from you that day because I was desperately scared of hurting you. I did hurt you. I did it carelessly and without thinking. It made me realize just how easy it would be to do so again. My life—my work is dangerous, Alex. I thought if I put you anymore into the center of it then you would get hurt or worse. Warren— well, let’s just say that he’s been stalking me since before my father’s death. I was worried that if he realized just how much I love you and care for you, he would hurt you in imaginable ways in order to get me to do whatever he wants.”

“What does he want? I don’t understand…”

“Alex, I promise you that I will answer all of your questions and more but please, let me get all of this out, alright?”

“Alright.” 

“When I said those terrible things to you, I was trying to get you to hate me. I wanted to poison any love that you had for me. I took all of the lessons that my father had ever taught me in how to injure and wound with words and I used them against you. I hated myself for that, but I thought that if it would keep you safe, it would have all been worth it. I would have bore your hate without complaint if it meant that you gave up on me and the black tapes and just went on and had a happy life. That was all that I wanted for you. I know you, and I should have known better. Telling you not to do something is the quickest way to make you do it. I knew from Ruby that you were still investigating, she and Nic were close. And if there was any doubt, it was cemented when Rebecca Yi emailed me, and told me that she was speaking to you. I didn’t think you would come to Chicago, but I should have known that you would have, and I thought that if I kept you close to me, if I asked for your help then at least I would be able to keep an eye on you. 

“I know you were furious with me that I wanted to speak to Amalia. I… When she had arrived in Seattle, I had a dream. A terrible nightmare. I dreamed that there was something else inside of her, something that was tied to the demons and everything else. I didn’t believe it--I didn’t want to believe it, but it wouldn’t leave me alone. That’s why I wished to speak to her in private, because I was attempting to find out if what I was concerned about was true, and if it was true how deeply she was infected by it. Yes, she was. There was something deeply wrong there.” 

“Is she--?” 

“She’s alright now. When Amalia decided to go back to Russia, Coralee helped her. She deprogrammed her.” 

“Coralee?!” Alex just stares at him. “Have you been in contact with her… have you known about her this entire time?” 

“No! Alex, I swear to you, I wasn’t until after the book cypher at the Empress. There were some… messages that were sent to my home in Chicago after the truth had come out. I ignored them, not trusting that they weren’t from someone else. Then, I ignored them out of anger at her. The reason that she’d sent them to the studio after that was because she knew that I wouldn’t be able to ignore them any further for two reasons. The first one was because you were involved; I couldn’t have ignored it because she sent it to you and the second was that when Charlie was a child, Coralee had taught her that if she was ever uncomfortable or in danger and needed to be picked up without any questions asked, she could mention either Tattycorum or chickens and one of us would immediately drop everything and come. Using both of those was a matter of life or death. It wasn’t a message that I could ignore any more.

“I’d been working with her via book cipher since, and then eventually through an anonymous texting program over the internet. It allowed us to be working on the same over the same time without needing to wait for the mail system. All we talked about, Alex was the work. That’s it. I told her that I wasn’t going to speak to her about anything else.” 

“Oh.” Alex just sits quietly for a moment, and she looks out the window. 

Richard’s fingers flex, and he’s fighting everything within him to just reach over and take her hand, but he couldn’t do that to her, not without her permission. And not without her knowing everything. So, his voice drops when he speaks again. “Alex, I know that you thought that my reaction to everything at the Empress was because of Coralee, because of my missing my wife, but it wasn’t. I swear on the head of my daughter that it wasn’t that. Everything that being there reminded me of wasn’t the loss of my wife. I wasn’t mourning her. I wasn’t wishing that she was there. Instead, I was thinking, what I couldn’t stop thinking about was how I wished that it had been you that I married. I couldn’t stop thinking about how even there on what was supposed to be the happiest day of my life, marrying my wife the kiss wasn’t a thousandth of what I felt when I kissed you in your office. That touching--having sex with her-- had never had the briefest glances of how good accidentally touching your finger was. That’s why I moved closer to you, that’s why I would have touched you. That’s why I was so upset about your asking for separate rooms. Because I was finally going to admit these things to both of us and I’d thought that I’d lost you forever.” 

Somewhere while they’d driven around, night had fallen and neither of them even noticed, and now Howard’s street was practically deserted when they’d pulled down it. Richard pulled into the driveway and he didn’t turn off the car before he looks at her. “If you want to come in, you can turn on your recorder and I’ll tell you what Coralee said and answer all of your questions. If you would prefer me to drop you off at the studio and for me to get out of your life, I will. You don’t owe me anything, Alex. And I can never make it right for the things that I’ve done to you, and I’m so sorry for that.” 

“Richard,” Alex just says softly, and she undoes her seatbelt. “I think that I deserve you asking if you can touch me.” 

Richard’s breath stills in his throat, because Alex isn’t cruel and she’s not looking at him like she’s angry. Something akin to hope, closer to it than he’d had since he’d found Bobby Maimes’ body blooms into his chest. “Alex,” he whispers softly. “Can I touch you?” 

“Yes.” Her voice is a whisper, and it’s immediately. 

Holding his breath the entire time, because what if she changes her mind, Richard reaches for her. He doesn’t brush his hand over her cheek or on her face. He doesn’t kiss her. Instead, what he does is reaches gently forward and just wraps his hand over the top of hers, and gives her fingers a light and hesitant squeeze. All of the feelings of things being right crash into him like the sea, a hurricane of emotion and sensation; it’s as if what had come before in her office were all the more strong now for all of the time that it’d been denied and all of the times that Richard had hurt her; and she had hurt him back in response. Touching her doesn’t undo all of those feelings; the guilt is there warring with the rightness but it quiets when Alex turns her hand over and slots her fingers between his own like they were always meant to go. In the moment it’s them touching one another, and choosing to touch one another at last. 

It’s a choice that the two of them will continue to make for the rest of their lives—the thought is both a premonition and a promise even if neither Alex nor Richard makes it aloud yet. 

“You know,” Alex says quickly, humor chasing away the shadows of everything sharp and bitter that has haunted them for the last year. “I’m pretty sure that is as far as your seat goes back and I really don’t particularly want your steering wheel in my ass the first time we make love. The joy of being adults means that we don’t actually have to have sex in a parked car if we don’t want to.” Giving Alex the adoring huff of a laugh that has always been hers, he matches her grin. Letting go of Alex has a cost and Richard is fairly certain that he has never moved so fast in his life to get out of the car to open her door for her. Scooping her up in his arms to carry her up to his porch, he can’t help but to notice the way that Alex very deliberately leaves her recorder on the seat she’d just vacated. Seeing the question in his eyes, Alex just speaks again. “There’s time for everything tomorrow or later tonight. For now, I just want you all to myself.”

Despite being surprised, but touched beyond measure, Richard dips his head to kiss her as he carries her blind up the porch and then he just whispers softly. “I love you, Alex Reagan. I think I’ve loved you my entire life without knowing it.”

“Of course you have my love,” Alex whispers against his lips. “Just like I have loved you for mine. We’re soulmates. It’s what we do.”

The lock to the door springs open without Richard even touching it, and he just adds, “well I hope it’s not all that we do, Alex.”

“Oh not on your life, Richard Strand.” The words are a laugh as Alex kisses him again while she kicks the door shut.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Comments and kudos are love!


End file.
